John Seed reviews the exhibition Legacy in Continuum: Bay Area Figuration at the Bakersfield Museum of Art, on view through May 27, 2012.

Seed notes that "the show pairs the work of some early Bay Area notables — Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, William 'Theophilius' Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira and Paul Wonner — with a selection of artists who have benefited from their examples. If there is one real lesson that Bay Area Figuration has taught American painters over time, it is that nothing should stop a painter from playing the range between painterly figuration and painterly abstraction."