Born in Tucson, Arizona, Paul Wonner moved to Northern California to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1941. Wonner spent the war years in military service in Texas, and then spent several years working in package design. Renewing his interest in the fine arts, Wonner returned to the Bay Area in 1950, and by 1953 he received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. In the late 1950s, Wonner worked as a librarian at the University of California at Davis, which was an early hotbed of post-war California art, and then relocated to Los Angeles, where he taught at the Otis Art Institute. Wonner also taught at UC Santa Barbara, two hours north of Los Angeles. Wonner settled in San Francisco in 1976, where he remained until his death.
Wonner was one of the group of artists known as the Bay Area Figurative Painters, which included among them David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira, Elmer Bischoff, Theophilus Brown, and James Weeks. The group's name derived from Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, a seminal exhibition at The Oakland Art Museum in 1957, of which Wonner was a part. These artists painted realistic subjects in a fluid, brushy manner derived from Abstract Expressionism. In contradistinction from post-war East Coast realists like Fairfield Porter, Philip Pearlstein, Alice Neel, and Jane Freilicher, who adhered to essentially literal representations of what was perceivable, the Bay Area painters focused on more improvisational, largely imagined compositions. Wonner worked in this mode until the late 1970s, when he moved to a much more crisp and finished style, while focusing almost exclusively on still life. In his later years Wonner's works became increasingly allegorical, with personal references and symbols scattered throughout his compositions.
