When Clement Greenberg wrote in 1947 that it is in “New York Bohemia … below 34th Street, that the fate of American art is being decided,” the influential art critic and Abstract Expressionism advocate may have spoken too soon. One year earlier, artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) had met painters David Park (1911-1960) and Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991) at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Along with artists Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920), Manuel Neri (b. 1930) and others, a tight-knit group of Bay Area painters and sculptors spent the following decades making abstract and figurative artworks that contained the energy of New York School action painting without the grandiosity, creating a contribution to American art history that has yet to be fully appreciated.

Installed in the new sky-lit exhibition space atop the Yale Art Gallery, Five West Coast Artists: Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Neri, Park, and Thiebaud is a forceful show. With limited wall text, the art does the talking. Though artworks here range in date from the 1950s to near present day, and include abstraction, still life, figure scenes and landscape, the show is cohesive, united by an embrace of materiality and a creative philosophy that placed a premium on visual pleasure and depth of feeling.

The exhibition opens with a room of abstract compositions by Diebenkorn, early organic abstractions and late geometric compositions displayed side by side. A larger gallery contains examples of Diebenkorn’s mid-career figurative paintings and drawings. Throughout Diebenkorn’s oeuvre, paintings convey a sense of touch, ​with ​pentimenti from earlier stages in the creative process clearly visible.

A number of Thiebaud’s renowned depictions of sweets are here, including “Drink Syrups,” 1961, “Candy Sticks,” 1964, “Nine Jelly Apples,” 1964, and “Pie Case,” 2002. Rendered with thick, brightly colored oil paint that looks iced onto the canvas, Thiebaud’s paint handling is well suited to his confectionery subjects. But it is the savory dish here that steals the show. In “Black Olives,” 1962, a plate of scattered, inky olives rests on a murky orange tabletop, orbs modeled with subtle blue highlights.

Yale University Art Gallery’s recent acquisition of David Park’s “The Model,” 1959, inspired this show. This painting is Park’s lone artwork here. The red studio interior is being called a “late masterpiece” by the museum, and, indeed, it is a showstopper. In a deceptively simple composition, a nude model fills the left side of the canvas, feet along the painting’s bottom edge, head grazing the top of the picture, while an easel holds a painting of the posing model on the right side. Made with wide house-painting brushes, this painting of a painting has both bravura and a classical sense of balance.

Explaining his turn away from Abstract Expressionism toward representation, Elmer Bischoff, in a 1977 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, said he was “plagued” by “tenderness, sentimentality, charm, seductiveness … lusciousness and sensuousness.” Beyond the lush brushwork in Bischoff’s two big canvases here, these paintings are spatially sophisticated. In “Cityscape,” 1965, the viewer is placed on an apartment balcony. Here the balcony railing and the overhang of the balcony above form interlocking Ls that create a sandwich of deep space and a strong scale jump from the elevated veranda to the skyline beyond.

Two sculpted female figures by Manuel Neri, one standing, one sitting, combine rough-hewn plaster with carefully sanded, smoothed forms. With brightly colored paint freely applied to the plaster, these painterly sculptures are at home here, surrounded by the figurative compositions of Park, Bischoff and Diebenkorn.

The wall text that does accompany the artwork is intimate, including some art school anecdotes by exhibition curator Jock Reynolds about Thiebaud and Neri. These student memories hit the right note, recalling a time when an inspired group of artists shared freely with their students, content to make innovative artworks outside the limelight.

Five West Coast Artists: Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Neri, Park, and Thiebaud, on view through July 13, 2014, Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT, 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com