In the 1950s and ’60s, a coterie of California artists known as the Bay Area Figurative painters went in the opposite direction from their Abstract Expressionist contemporaries back East. David Park led the realism-embracing movement, whose adherents also included Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, William Theophilus Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira. Prices remain low for these artists, with the exception of Diebenkorn, who focused on abstraction in the late 1960s and grosses far more than the others. The market for the whole group, however, has risen since 2000. In fact, Park’s tranquil scenes of an Edenic California have been going for almost as much as Diebenkorn’s figurative paintings. The best Bay Area works pop up regularly at the postwar and contemporary day sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, as well as at Bonhams &Butterfields’s Made in California auctions. And in May, San Francisco’s Hackett-Freedman Gallery—one of the leading dealers in California art, together with John Berggruen Gallery, also in San Francisco, and New York’s Hollis Taggart Galleries—hosted a show of Park’s work. “Enough time has gone by that people have begun to realize not only what a great artist Park was but that he had a significant influence on Diebenkorn as well,” says the gallery owner, Michael Hackett.