The unbelievable tale of San Francisco’s bullfighting bar owner

Last week in the American Messenger art gallery at Ninth and Folsom, dozens of patrons munched on dumplings and listened to the cacophonous sounds of the Lion Dance ME troupe. In the center of the room hung a massive painting — 6 feet tall by 14 feet wide — depicting a painter alongside around a dozen tastefully posed naked women.

The self-portrait was created in 1953 by Barnaby Conrad Jr., a bullfighting San Francisco bar owner dubbed “one of the most creative San Franciscans of the 20th century” by the San Francisco Examiner. It served as the centerpiece of an art show featuring a dozen other local artists.

“The Barnaby Conrad opus that I found had been tucked away in storage for a couple decades or more,” said Charles Linder, curator of American Messenger, of the found works on display. “It was just a neat feeling, like you’re glimpsing the past history of the city.” 

Born in San Francisco in 1922, Conrad moved to Mexico City to study painting at age 19. While attending a bullfight, he jumped into the ring, used his Brooks Brothers raincoat as a cape and “barely escaped” the bull, according to the New York Times. He went on to train with a famous bullfighter, getting gored during his first session with a live bull. He healed up in time to return to the U.S. to complete his studies at Yale, but his bullfighting career was just beginning.

He next made his way to Spain, where he served as the American vice consul and studied under famed matador Juan Belmonte. He would go on to participate in 47 fights and kill 35 bulls, being falsely reported dead in the ring on more than one occasion, and become the first American to have fought in Spain, Mexico and Peru.

Conrad’s experiences in the ring gave verisimilitude to a novel he wrote called “Matador,” published in 1952, which John Steinbeck called his favorite book of the year. It would go on to sell more than 2 million copies, earning him nearly $100,000 in its first year of publication and funding the opening of his bar El Matador at Broadway and Kearny, which the Chronicle referred to as “the city’s white-hot center for hobnobbing” during the 1950s and early ’60s. Conrad knew San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen when he was just 18 years old and “very broke,” the pair becoming close friends who even vacationed together later in life. Caen was noted as the bar’s first customer and had his own table reserved with a small plaque, where he’d bring stars like Frank Sinatra and Truman Capote.

The painting now on display on Folsom Street was the centerpiece of El Matador, hanging behind the bar. Thomasina DeMaio, an artist and educator who curated a complementary room of paintings by local artists at American Messenger, remembered seeing Conrad’s painting at the bar when she would frequent the establishment to drop off money for bookies (she referred to it as a “gambling house”).

By age 35, Conrad had “enough success for three or four men,” wrote the San Francisco News. The San Francisco Examiner doubled down on the praise, writing that “on every level on which he has attempted to communicate, he has been eminently successful.” 

By age 36, he’d been gored through the leg for (at least) a second time, effectively ending his bullfighting career.

In addition to the best-selling “Matador,” he also wrote for magazines and published more than 30 books. His portraits of Alex Haley, James Michener and Truman Capote hang in the National Portrait Gallery. He taught at the SF Academy of Art. His book “San Francisco: A Profile With Pictures” was compared to a “visual Herb Caen column” by the Chronicle. He was a cocktail pianist, started a writers conference and learned to fly planes. There’s almost nothing he didn’t try, and his son Barnaby Conrad III followed in his artistic footsteps as a painter and writer with a penchant for bulls (he ran with them in Pamplona). Barnaby Conrad Jr. died at age 90 in 2013 in Santa Barbara County, where he lived the second half of his life.

The untitled painting hung in El Matador until its closure in the mid-60s, after which it was moved to the dining room of Jovanelo’s Restaurant at 840 Sansome St., which was owned by a friend of Conrad’s named Joseph Piccinini. It hung there into the 1980s, until that restaurant shuttered, and then was moved to Piccinini’s East Bay art storage space — where it stayed until San Francisco attorney Marc Libarle was invited to tour the space in 2010.

“If there were 70 pieces of art, there were 700,” Libarle said. He knew of Conrad’s written work and the legend of his bullfighting. He was struck by the size of the painting and purchased it for his own collection. “I just thought it was great unique San Francisco artistry,” he said.

From there, it ended up once again in storage at a space on Green and Polk, until Charles Linder stumbled onto it and thought it deserved to be seen.

“It just looks resplendent. It’s sort of a sepia-toned painting and bespeaks an era of that time on Broadway,” Linder said, calling it a transitional piece between the Barbary Coast era and the Beat Generation.

Priced at $150,000, the piece serves as a centerpiece of an art show that will be on display through May, which includes a second portrait by Conrad of fashion designer Arnold Scaasi. The rest of the gallery is filled with work from several contemporary artists (including Linder), plus a few historic San Francisco figures who date back to the early 1900s, like Xavier Martinez and Ralph Stackpole. In addition to the painting, shelves display several of Conrad’s books, giving a fuller picture of his storied career.

“What really captivated me was just the lore of him as a San Franciscan and a legend,” Conrad said.