Elmer Bischoff was one of the most prominent painters of the Bay Area Figurative movement. Along with colleagues such as David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Clyfford Still, Bischoff taught from 1946 to 1952 at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) at a time when the school was a center for Abstract Expressionism on the West Coast. Yet in the early 1950s, Bischoff, like Park and Diebenkorn, turned to figuration, frustrated with the dominance of nonobjective painting in postwar American art.

The archetypal female bather subject of "Girl with Towel" resonates with mythological and biblical antecedents. Reconciling the gestural brushwork of Abstract Expressionism with representational subject matter, the painting captures the elemental meeting of earth, sea, and sky so familiar to San Francisco Bay Area residents.