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Mary Abbott One of the leaders and early exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Mary Abbott created powerful oil paintings in which she combined spontaneous, gestural brushwork with a highly creative use of color. Lauded for its energy and vital feeling of immediacy, her work reflected her desire to translate sensations into paint; as she put it, “I like the process of painting. The intensity of Living Nature through myself––using the medium, paint, color and line defining the poetry of living space; that is my aim, life and work.”
Born in New York on 27 July 1921, Mary Abbott boasted an impressive pedigree: a descendant of such luminaries as President John Adams and General Robert E. Lee, she was the daughter of Naval Commander and military adviser Henry Abbott and his wife, Elizabeth Grinnell, a poet and writer.
Abbott grew up primarily in Manhattan, where she attended Miss Chapin’s School, graduating in 1939. She also spent time in Washington, D.C., Concord, Massachusetts and Southampton, Long Island. At the age of twelve she enrolled in Saturday classes at the Art Students League of New York; by the late 1930s, she was taking advanced courses there, working under the painter George Grosz, who was impressed by her serious demeanor. Throughout this period, she also became acquainted with the work of master painters, ranging from Cimabue and Tintoretto to Eugene Delacroix, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, all of whom came to influence her art. On her summer trips to the nation’s capital, Abbott also studied with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran Museum School.
A member of the upper echelons of New York society, the stylish Abbott became a debutante at a coming out party held at the Colony Club in 1941. Shortly after, she began working as a part-time model for Vogue magazine. In 1943, she married the painter Lewis R. Teague (1917-78), after which the couple moved around the country while Teague served in the Army Air Force during the war. During this period, Abbott spent her time reading the writings of Marcel Proust, studied the work of Pablo Picasso and made paintings inspired by the example of Maurice Utrillo. Returning to New York at the end of the war, she continued modeling for Vogue and other fashion publications, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle.
In about 1946, Abbott left her husband and settled into a cold water flat on Tenth Street. Two years later she met the sculptor, photographer and painter David Hare who introduced her to The Subject of the Artist School, a short-lived experimental school established by Hare and other pioneering abstractionists, including Mark Rothko, Barney Newman and Robert Motherwell. Abbott was one of the few women to attend the school, where she was deeply inspired by Newman and Rothko.
“Motherwell was in charge and he was okay, but always trying to educate you,” Abbott said. “I preferred Barney Newman and Rothko. . . . they were the ones I learned the most from. They taught us to draw imagination.”
She subsequently abandoned her interest in recognizable subject matter and the art of the School of Paris in favor of abstraction. Her concern for intuitive painting was further enhanced in 1948 or 1949, when Abbott met the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, with whom she enjoyed a lengthy personal and professional relationship.
In 1950, Abbott married Tom Clyde, a former investment firm manager, and settled in Southampton, where she used a rented barn for her studio. At the same time, she continued her affiliation with New York’s downtown art scene, maintaining a Manhattan studio and frequenting the Artist’s Club, whose women members included Elaine de Kooning and Perle Fine. She also fraternized with painters such as Jackson Pollock, the writer Frank O’Hara and the poet John Ashbury at nightly gathering places such as the Cedar Tavern. During the 1950s, Abbott began to make her mark in New York art circles, exhibiting her work at local commercial venues, including the legendary Stable Gallery, where she was included in the annuals of 1954, 1955 and 1957. Her paintings from this period consisted of all-over compositions composed in oil, charcoal and oil stick. In 1959, Abbott explored the Abstract Expressionist concept of unconscious expression by collaborating with the poet and critic Barbara Guest to create word pictures in which Guest would say a word and Abbott would produce a visual response.
Following her divorce from Clyde in 1966, Abbott purchased a small house in Southampton, where she continued to spend her summers. She went on to create paintings and drawings characterized by sweeping, energetic strokes that reveal her personal response to her environment, her inherent feeling for her medium and her use of color to create mood. From 1974 to 1977, Abbott taught at the University of Minnesota, at which time she delved further into the study of chromatics. Returning to New York, she acquired a loft on West Broadway and turned her attention to a series of flower paintings that pulsate with energy and color.
Abbott has had many solo exhibitions and she has participated in group shows in the United States and abroad, including the 2008 exhibition, The Persistence of Abstraction, held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. In 2011 she was the recipient of the ArtHampton Lifetime Achievement Award, a distinction bestowed on an artist who has made a significant contribution to the visual arts.
In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.
Abbott died of heart failure at age 98 on August 23, 2019.
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. From May 9 – June 28, 2025, the Schoelkopf Gallery mounted a retrospective of her work titled, Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination.
Examples of Abbott's work can be found at the Avram Gallery at Southampton College, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, and Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins in Mougins, France, among others.
Born in New York on 27 July 1921, Mary Abbott boasted an impressive pedigree: a descendant of such luminaries as President John Adams and General Robert E. Lee, she was the daughter of Naval Commander and military adviser Henry Abbott and his wife, Elizabeth Grinnell, a poet and writer.
Abbott grew up primarily in Manhattan, where she attended Miss Chapin’s School, graduating in 1939. She also spent time in Washington, D.C., Concord, Massachusetts and Southampton, Long Island. At the age of twelve she enrolled in Saturday classes at the Art Students League of New York; by the late 1930s, she was taking advanced courses there, working under the painter George Grosz, who was impressed by her serious demeanor. Throughout this period, she also became acquainted with the work of master painters, ranging from Cimabue and Tintoretto to Eugene Delacroix, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, all of whom came to influence her art. On her summer trips to the nation’s capital, Abbott also studied with Eugene Weiss at the Corcoran Museum School.
A member of the upper echelons of New York society, the stylish Abbott became a debutante at a coming out party held at the Colony Club in 1941. Shortly after, she began working as a part-time model for Vogue magazine. In 1943, she married the painter Lewis R. Teague (1917-78), after which the couple moved around the country while Teague served in the Army Air Force during the war. During this period, Abbott spent her time reading the writings of Marcel Proust, studied the work of Pablo Picasso and made paintings inspired by the example of Maurice Utrillo. Returning to New York at the end of the war, she continued modeling for Vogue and other fashion publications, such as Harper’s Bazaar and Mademoiselle.
In about 1946, Abbott left her husband and settled into a cold water flat on Tenth Street. Two years later she met the sculptor, photographer and painter David Hare who introduced her to The Subject of the Artist School, a short-lived experimental school established by Hare and other pioneering abstractionists, including Mark Rothko, Barney Newman and Robert Motherwell. Abbott was one of the few women to attend the school, where she was deeply inspired by Newman and Rothko.
“Motherwell was in charge and he was okay, but always trying to educate you,” Abbott said. “I preferred Barney Newman and Rothko. . . . they were the ones I learned the most from. They taught us to draw imagination.”
She subsequently abandoned her interest in recognizable subject matter and the art of the School of Paris in favor of abstraction. Her concern for intuitive painting was further enhanced in 1948 or 1949, when Abbott met the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, with whom she enjoyed a lengthy personal and professional relationship.
In 1950, Abbott married Tom Clyde, a former investment firm manager, and settled in Southampton, where she used a rented barn for her studio. At the same time, she continued her affiliation with New York’s downtown art scene, maintaining a Manhattan studio and frequenting the Artist’s Club, whose women members included Elaine de Kooning and Perle Fine. She also fraternized with painters such as Jackson Pollock, the writer Frank O’Hara and the poet John Ashbury at nightly gathering places such as the Cedar Tavern. During the 1950s, Abbott began to make her mark in New York art circles, exhibiting her work at local commercial venues, including the legendary Stable Gallery, where she was included in the annuals of 1954, 1955 and 1957. Her paintings from this period consisted of all-over compositions composed in oil, charcoal and oil stick. In 1959, Abbott explored the Abstract Expressionist concept of unconscious expression by collaborating with the poet and critic Barbara Guest to create word pictures in which Guest would say a word and Abbott would produce a visual response.
Following her divorce from Clyde in 1966, Abbott purchased a small house in Southampton, where she continued to spend her summers. She went on to create paintings and drawings characterized by sweeping, energetic strokes that reveal her personal response to her environment, her inherent feeling for her medium and her use of color to create mood. From 1974 to 1977, Abbott taught at the University of Minnesota, at which time she delved further into the study of chromatics. Returning to New York, she acquired a loft on West Broadway and turned her attention to a series of flower paintings that pulsate with energy and color.
Abbott has had many solo exhibitions and she has participated in group shows in the United States and abroad, including the 2008 exhibition, The Persistence of Abstraction, held at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. In 2011 she was the recipient of the ArtHampton Lifetime Achievement Award, a distinction bestowed on an artist who has made a significant contribution to the visual arts.
In 2016 her work was included in the exhibition Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum.
Abbott died of heart failure at age 98 on August 23, 2019.
In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. From May 9 – June 28, 2025, the Schoelkopf Gallery mounted a retrospective of her work titled, Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination.
Examples of Abbott's work can be found at the Avram Gallery at Southampton College, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Denver Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, and Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins in Mougins, France, among others.
Clinton Adams Clinton Adams was born in Glendale, California, in 1918, and began his career as an artist and teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Bachelor of Education and Masters degrees there before going on to teach in the art department from 1946 to 1954. While at UCLA, Adams formed relationships with many of the pioneers of California Modernism, including Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, and others. From there, he went on to head the art departments at the Universities of Kentucky and Florida, before moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1961. He was the Dean of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico from 1961 to 1976. He continued to live in Albuquerque until his death in 2002.
Adams began his artistic career primarily as a painter. However, while at UCLA, Adams met the Los Angeles printer Lynton Kistler, who introduced Adams to print-making and lithography. Kistler also introduced Adams to the lithographer June Wayne who, in 1960, founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, a workshop devoted to the exploration of the medium of print-making and to the training of master lithographers. In 1970, the Tamarind Workshop moved to the University of New Mexico and became the Tamarind Institute, where Adams became its director. He directed the Institute until 1985.
Adams was a scholar, as well as an artist and teacher. From 1974 to 1990, he founded and edited the Tamarind Papers, a scholarly journal devoted to historical, critical and technical articles on prints and print-making. He contributed extensively to other journals, such as Print Quarterly, and authored numerous authoritative books on the subject of print-making, including American Lithographers: 1900-1960: The Artists and their Printers; Crayonstone: The Life and Work of Bolton Brown; and The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques.
Adams’ work has been exhibited in more than 60 solo exhibitions and many public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of American Art. His numerous honors include his election to the National Academy of Design in 1987, the Southern Graphic Council’s Printmaker-Emeritus Award in 1998, and the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts of New Mexico in 1985.
Adams’ early work is strongly cubist in style, with a particular focus on architectural form and structure. This architectural sensibility is also prominent in his later work, along with the use of “vibrant and translucent colors, reminiscent of the sparkling California and Mediterranean climes and brilliant light of New Mexico that he loved”, according to Tobey Moss, a long-time friend of Adams. Van Deren Coke, founding director of the UNM Art Museum observed that Adams’ works “are not a string of individual pictures, but the collective results of a growing confidence in his ability to make his hand follow his mind...a unity of pared-down forms and delicate tone shifts, a sense of movement across the plane of his pictures and into the space beyond. The choice of adjacent colors...the sure but not static interlocking of forms...[evoke] a sense of joyous vitality...His paintings open doors to the pleasures of simplicity and enhance our powers of imagination”.
Adams began his artistic career primarily as a painter. However, while at UCLA, Adams met the Los Angeles printer Lynton Kistler, who introduced Adams to print-making and lithography. Kistler also introduced Adams to the lithographer June Wayne who, in 1960, founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, a workshop devoted to the exploration of the medium of print-making and to the training of master lithographers. In 1970, the Tamarind Workshop moved to the University of New Mexico and became the Tamarind Institute, where Adams became its director. He directed the Institute until 1985.
Adams was a scholar, as well as an artist and teacher. From 1974 to 1990, he founded and edited the Tamarind Papers, a scholarly journal devoted to historical, critical and technical articles on prints and print-making. He contributed extensively to other journals, such as Print Quarterly, and authored numerous authoritative books on the subject of print-making, including American Lithographers: 1900-1960: The Artists and their Printers; Crayonstone: The Life and Work of Bolton Brown; and The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art and Techniques.
Adams’ work has been exhibited in more than 60 solo exhibitions and many public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of American Art. His numerous honors include his election to the National Academy of Design in 1987, the Southern Graphic Council’s Printmaker-Emeritus Award in 1998, and the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Arts of New Mexico in 1985.
Adams’ early work is strongly cubist in style, with a particular focus on architectural form and structure. This architectural sensibility is also prominent in his later work, along with the use of “vibrant and translucent colors, reminiscent of the sparkling California and Mediterranean climes and brilliant light of New Mexico that he loved”, according to Tobey Moss, a long-time friend of Adams. Van Deren Coke, founding director of the UNM Art Museum observed that Adams’ works “are not a string of individual pictures, but the collective results of a growing confidence in his ability to make his hand follow his mind...a unity of pared-down forms and delicate tone shifts, a sense of movement across the plane of his pictures and into the space beyond. The choice of adjacent colors...the sure but not static interlocking of forms...[evoke] a sense of joyous vitality...His paintings open doors to the pleasures of simplicity and enhance our powers of imagination”.
Ansel Adams Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.
He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Adams was a key advisor in the founding and establishment of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 12, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Adams was a key advisor in the founding and establishment of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
Peter Alexander Peter Alexander (February 27, 1939 – May 26, 2020) was an American artist and an important part of the Light and Space artistic movement in southern California in the 1960s.
Alexander was born in Los Angeles on February 27, 1939. His family had been residing in Southern California for four generations and operated oil fields.He originally intended to go into architecture, studying at the University of Pennsylvania (1957–1960); the Architectural Association in London (1960–1962); the University of California, Berkeley (1962–1963); the University of Southern California (1963–64); and the University of California, Los Angeles (1964–65 and 1965–66). At UCLA, he earned first a bachelor's degree in 1965, and then a Master of Fine Arts three years later.
After initially working as an architect - he was a protégé of architectural visionaries Richard Neutra and William Pereira - Alexander rose to prominence in the 1960s with translucent resin sculptures. Having nurtured a lifelong love of surfing, he used resin to fix his boards for many years. Alexander’s decision to utilize resin as an artistic material in the early 1960s was something of an epiphany. He had poured the material into a Dixie Cup to seal his surfboard, but found that over time the resin hardened into a translucent circle. This realization heralded the creation of Alexander’s iconic polyester resin sculptures that would position him as a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a vanguard of the California Light and Space movement, alongside his contemporaries Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, and Larry Bell.
In the 1970s, formal similarities between Alexander’s sculptures and the work by Minimal artists in New York such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt were noted. They too worked with non-traditional materials and eliminated traces of personal touch. The resin works’ luminous transparency, however, typifies the Light and Space movement.
Throughout his career, Alexander found inspiration for his art through a multitude of sources, including geometry, the landscape of his native California, the phenomen- ological effects of color and light, and perspectival nuance. He maintained a deep interest in the work of Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, particularly his ability to embed his works with “that certain quality of light, that quality of being under water.” Mark Rothko’s approach to color and mark making also served as a cornerstone for Alexander’s practice, and he once said, “I’ve always loved Rothko and the sensibility [within the edges he creates], so I decided to cast objects that had those kinds of edges that disappeared.”
Although he utilized resin extensively in his early works, Alexander stopped working with the material around 1972 after it caused him to be hospitalized. He subsequently turned to painting during the next three decades, doing so on canvas, paper and velvet and explored drawing, lithography, and polaroid photography. The theme of these works was inspired by the landscape, light and other natural phenomena around his hometown.
When examining his work in these alternate mediums, the artist’s attentiveness to color becomes incredibly evident. In a 1971 interview, Alexander said, “Part of the concern that I have with color is that a very slight varying color could alter how you felt about it or you felt toward it or the kind of vibrations it sent off.”
Alexander only went back to producing sculptures after 2006, when one of his resin sculptures at the Centre Pompidou was destroyed before an exhibition. The museum not only compensated him for the sculpture, but also funded him to make a replacement. He was able to employ urethane, a less toxic material that was more effective at displaying pigment.
Alexander was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980) and the California Art Award (2014). He was artist-in-residence at several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA, 1970-71), University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, 1981), and Sarabhai Foundation (Ahmedabad, India, 1983).
In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA) mounted a retrospective exhibition titled “Peter Alexander: In this Light”. In 2011 he was part of the landmark “Pacific Standard Time” intitative at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California (Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970).
Alexander died on May 26, 2020, at his home in Santa Monica at the age of 81.
Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited worldwide since the mid-1960s, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; among others.
His work is held in numerous institutional collections, including: The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
Recent exhibitions include: “The Bunker Artspace: Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody”, West Palm Beach, FL (2024); “On the Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection”, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2024); “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–80s”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2023); “Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection”, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA (2023); and “Light & Space”, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022).
biographical sources include PACE Gallery; Franklin Parrasch Gallery ; johnmoran.com; zandergalerie; others
Alexander was born in Los Angeles on February 27, 1939. His family had been residing in Southern California for four generations and operated oil fields.He originally intended to go into architecture, studying at the University of Pennsylvania (1957–1960); the Architectural Association in London (1960–1962); the University of California, Berkeley (1962–1963); the University of Southern California (1963–64); and the University of California, Los Angeles (1964–65 and 1965–66). At UCLA, he earned first a bachelor's degree in 1965, and then a Master of Fine Arts three years later.
After initially working as an architect - he was a protégé of architectural visionaries Richard Neutra and William Pereira - Alexander rose to prominence in the 1960s with translucent resin sculptures. Having nurtured a lifelong love of surfing, he used resin to fix his boards for many years. Alexander’s decision to utilize resin as an artistic material in the early 1960s was something of an epiphany. He had poured the material into a Dixie Cup to seal his surfboard, but found that over time the resin hardened into a translucent circle. This realization heralded the creation of Alexander’s iconic polyester resin sculptures that would position him as a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a vanguard of the California Light and Space movement, alongside his contemporaries Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, and Larry Bell.
In the 1970s, formal similarities between Alexander’s sculptures and the work by Minimal artists in New York such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt were noted. They too worked with non-traditional materials and eliminated traces of personal touch. The resin works’ luminous transparency, however, typifies the Light and Space movement.
Throughout his career, Alexander found inspiration for his art through a multitude of sources, including geometry, the landscape of his native California, the phenomen- ological effects of color and light, and perspectival nuance. He maintained a deep interest in the work of Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, particularly his ability to embed his works with “that certain quality of light, that quality of being under water.” Mark Rothko’s approach to color and mark making also served as a cornerstone for Alexander’s practice, and he once said, “I’ve always loved Rothko and the sensibility [within the edges he creates], so I decided to cast objects that had those kinds of edges that disappeared.”
Although he utilized resin extensively in his early works, Alexander stopped working with the material around 1972 after it caused him to be hospitalized. He subsequently turned to painting during the next three decades, doing so on canvas, paper and velvet and explored drawing, lithography, and polaroid photography. The theme of these works was inspired by the landscape, light and other natural phenomena around his hometown.
When examining his work in these alternate mediums, the artist’s attentiveness to color becomes incredibly evident. In a 1971 interview, Alexander said, “Part of the concern that I have with color is that a very slight varying color could alter how you felt about it or you felt toward it or the kind of vibrations it sent off.”
Alexander only went back to producing sculptures after 2006, when one of his resin sculptures at the Centre Pompidou was destroyed before an exhibition. The museum not only compensated him for the sculpture, but also funded him to make a replacement. He was able to employ urethane, a less toxic material that was more effective at displaying pigment.
Alexander was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980) and the California Art Award (2014). He was artist-in-residence at several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA, 1970-71), University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, 1981), and Sarabhai Foundation (Ahmedabad, India, 1983).
In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA) mounted a retrospective exhibition titled “Peter Alexander: In this Light”. In 2011 he was part of the landmark “Pacific Standard Time” intitative at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California (Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970).
Alexander died on May 26, 2020, at his home in Santa Monica at the age of 81.
Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited worldwide since the mid-1960s, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; among others.
His work is held in numerous institutional collections, including: The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
Recent exhibitions include: “The Bunker Artspace: Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody”, West Palm Beach, FL (2024); “On the Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection”, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2024); “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–80s”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2023); “Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection”, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA (2023); and “Light & Space”, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022).
biographical sources include PACE Gallery; Franklin Parrasch Gallery ; johnmoran.com; zandergalerie; others
Ralph Anderson Ralph Anderson was born in Los Angeles, CA on December 16, 1929. He currently lives in northern California.
Garo Antreasian Garo Antreasian was born on February 16, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to an Armenian family. His parents had survived the Armenian genocide of 1915.Antreasian attended Arsenal Technical High School, where he was introduced to lithography. He studied at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. He moved to New York in 1948 where he studied at Atelier 17 and the Art Students League of New York.
In 1960 he was one of the founders of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California. There he served as the first technical director and master printer. The Tamarind moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it became known as the Tamarind Institute. In 1964 Antreasian moved to Albuquerque as well, where he taught art at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and retained his relationship with the Tamarind. He was involved with bringing the Tamarind Institute under the auspices of UNM. Antreasian taught at UNM from 1964 to 1987 and eventually became the chairman of the Department of Art and Art History, and then professor emeritus after his retirement.
Antreasian died on November 3, 2018, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Antreasian's work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, he National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Hyde Collection.
In 1960 he was one of the founders of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California. There he served as the first technical director and master printer. The Tamarind moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it became known as the Tamarind Institute. In 1964 Antreasian moved to Albuquerque as well, where he taught art at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and retained his relationship with the Tamarind. He was involved with bringing the Tamarind Institute under the auspices of UNM. Antreasian taught at UNM from 1964 to 1987 and eventually became the chairman of the Department of Art and Art History, and then professor emeritus after his retirement.
Antreasian died on November 3, 2018, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Antreasian's work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, he National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Hyde Collection.
Horace Armistead Horace Armistead was born in in London, England, where he served an apprenticeship at the Helmsley Scenic Studio before coming to work first in Boston as early as 1925 before then coming to New York City where he wroked for the Metropolitan Opera House. He is best known for his scenic and costume designs for a variety of plays, ballets, and operas in the 1930s through the 1950s. He won a a Tony Award in 1947 for his design for Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium.”
Jozef Gabriel Bakos Jozef Bakós was a significant contributor to the growth and spread of American Modernism in the Southwest. The son of Polish immigrants, Bakós was born in 1891 in Buffalo, New York. He began his study of art at the Art School of the Albright Art Gallery under the tutelage of the artist and cartoonist, John E. Thompson. In addition to painting and exhibiting, Bakós supported himself with carpentry and furniture-making. He also worked as an art instructor at the University of Denver from 1931-1933 and at Santa Fe High School in the 1940s. He continued to live and work in Santa Fe until his death in 1977.
Mary Bauermeister Mary Bauermeister is known for her lens boxes and other fantastic assemblages that grew out of her early association with philosophical thinkers, scientists, and musicians in postwar Germany. Born in Frankfurt, she grew up in a country devastated by war, and began to paint in 1954. In 1957, she opened a studio in Cologne that soon became a center for musical events, art exhibits, and happenings.
Among the participants was Karlheinz Stockhausen, the famous composer of electronic music, who was working at the nearby electronic music laboratory of the West German Rundfunk (radio station). He attracted composer John Cage, modern dancer Merce Cunningham, artist Nam Jun Paik, and other experimenters to Cologne. Bauermeister found herself amidst a postwar renaissance of writers, architects, and other cultural leaders. The assemblages of Neo-Dadaists such as Jean Tinguely and Arman, shown in nearby Dusseldorf, also influenced her work.
In 1961, at age twenty-seven, Bauermeister took a seminar with Stockhausen and began to apply musical theory concepts to the visual arts. Breaking down the elements of the visual world, she assigned a scale of five degrees to each: frequency of light, intensity, volume, time, and material, and designed her works with these in mind. For instance, following the example of music, in one exhibition she tried to introduce the element of time and continual change by having pieces and parts of one work distributed around the room among other works, as in Gruppenbilder (1962).
Her first one-woman show was as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962. Bauermeister came to New York (and became an American citizen) when Pop Art was flourishing, but in her own work she exhibited assemblages of graduated pebbles and sand on various sizes of square boards (Progressions (1963)) and also covered a gallery floor with pebbles and sand.
Delighting in metaphysical and philosophical games concerning the nature of illusion versus reality, she began to created provocative lens-box assemblages, combining lenses with drawing, writing, painting, bones, shells, and other materials, all woven together with a fine, decorative pen-and-ink line. In these works the lenses create prismatic reflections and mysterious undulations of the objects and drawings underneath them ("Absolute Masterpiece"/peace (1969)). She may show a lens distorting something and next to it draw her view of that distorted object, then draw a hand that is in turn drawing the object. In "Poeme Optique" (1964), Bauermeister mounted lenses and drawing on movable panes of glass. As they are rotated, letter, words, and images rearrange themselves in unexpected phrases and visual paradoxes.
At the gala opening of her 1964 exhibition at New York’s Bonino Gallery (attended by Jacqueline Kennedy and other distinguished patrons of the arts), Heinz Stockhausen gave a concert of electronic music to accompany slides of Bauermeister’s assemblages. The Whitney, Hirschhorn, and Guggenheim Museums purchased her work.
In 1970, she cut up artists easels and combined them in spiral forms or sculptures that moved up staircases and around corners. Perhaps this was symbolic of the fact that art was entering a new phase, or that she and her art were going to move elsewhere.
Bauermeister married her mentor Heinz Stockhausen in the 1960s, and returned to Germany in 1972. She had five children and lived and worked outside of Cologne.
She was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2019, and received the Kunstpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) in 2021.
Bauermeister passed away March 2, 2023.
Her works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northhampton; the Groninger Museum, Niederlande; the Museum Ludwig, Köln; the Staatliches Museum,Schwerin; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen; the Mittelrheinmuseum, Koblenz; the Kunstsammlung des deutschen Bundes, Berlin; and the Zero Foundation, Düsseldorf, among many other public and private collections.
Among the participants was Karlheinz Stockhausen, the famous composer of electronic music, who was working at the nearby electronic music laboratory of the West German Rundfunk (radio station). He attracted composer John Cage, modern dancer Merce Cunningham, artist Nam Jun Paik, and other experimenters to Cologne. Bauermeister found herself amidst a postwar renaissance of writers, architects, and other cultural leaders. The assemblages of Neo-Dadaists such as Jean Tinguely and Arman, shown in nearby Dusseldorf, also influenced her work.
In 1961, at age twenty-seven, Bauermeister took a seminar with Stockhausen and began to apply musical theory concepts to the visual arts. Breaking down the elements of the visual world, she assigned a scale of five degrees to each: frequency of light, intensity, volume, time, and material, and designed her works with these in mind. For instance, following the example of music, in one exhibition she tried to introduce the element of time and continual change by having pieces and parts of one work distributed around the room among other works, as in Gruppenbilder (1962).
Her first one-woman show was as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962. Bauermeister came to New York (and became an American citizen) when Pop Art was flourishing, but in her own work she exhibited assemblages of graduated pebbles and sand on various sizes of square boards (Progressions (1963)) and also covered a gallery floor with pebbles and sand.
Delighting in metaphysical and philosophical games concerning the nature of illusion versus reality, she began to created provocative lens-box assemblages, combining lenses with drawing, writing, painting, bones, shells, and other materials, all woven together with a fine, decorative pen-and-ink line. In these works the lenses create prismatic reflections and mysterious undulations of the objects and drawings underneath them ("Absolute Masterpiece"/peace (1969)). She may show a lens distorting something and next to it draw her view of that distorted object, then draw a hand that is in turn drawing the object. In "Poeme Optique" (1964), Bauermeister mounted lenses and drawing on movable panes of glass. As they are rotated, letter, words, and images rearrange themselves in unexpected phrases and visual paradoxes.
At the gala opening of her 1964 exhibition at New York’s Bonino Gallery (attended by Jacqueline Kennedy and other distinguished patrons of the arts), Heinz Stockhausen gave a concert of electronic music to accompany slides of Bauermeister’s assemblages. The Whitney, Hirschhorn, and Guggenheim Museums purchased her work.
In 1970, she cut up artists easels and combined them in spiral forms or sculptures that moved up staircases and around corners. Perhaps this was symbolic of the fact that art was entering a new phase, or that she and her art were going to move elsewhere.
Bauermeister married her mentor Heinz Stockhausen in the 1960s, and returned to Germany in 1972. She had five children and lived and worked outside of Cologne.
She was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2019, and received the Kunstpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) in 2021.
Bauermeister passed away March 2, 2023.
Her works are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, New York City; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northhampton; the Groninger Museum, Niederlande; the Museum Ludwig, Köln; the Staatliches Museum,Schwerin; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen; the Mittelrheinmuseum, Koblenz; the Kunstsammlung des deutschen Bundes, Berlin; and the Zero Foundation, Düsseldorf, among many other public and private collections.
Herbert Bayer Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was born in Austria, where he entered into an apprenticeship under the architect and designer, Georg Smidthammer, with whom Bayer learned drawing, painting, and architectural drafting, inspired by nature and without formal knowledge of art history. In 1920, Bayer discovered the theoretical writings of the artist Vassily Kandinsky, as well as Walter Gropius’ 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, in which Gropius declared the necessity for a return to crafts as a source of true creativity and inspiration. Bayer traveled to Weimar to meet Gropius in October of 1921 and was immediately accepted into the Bauhaus. There, he was deeply influenced by the instruction of Kandinsky, Johannes Itten and Paul Klee.
In 1928 Bayer moved to Berlin together with several members of the Bauhaus staff including Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer. He found work as a freelance graphic designer, particularly with German Vogue, under its art director Agha. When the latter returned to Paris, Bayer joined the staff full time, and also worked increasingly with Dorland, the magazine's principal advertising agency. It was in the period from 1928 to his emigration to America in 1938 that he developed his unique vision as an artist, combining a strongly modernist aesthetic sense with a rare ability to convey meaning clearly and directly. This seamless combination of art, craft and design mark Bayer as true prophet of Bauhaus theories.
Bayer followed Gropius to America in 1938, and set his breadth of skills to work later that year in designing the landmark Bauhaus 1918-1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Bayer flourished in New York as a designer and architect, but it was his meeting with the industrialist Walter Paepcke in 1946 that allowed him to harness his concepts of 'total design' to the postwar boom. Paepcke was developing Aspen as a cultural and intellectual destination, and found in Bayer the perfect collaborator. Bayer was designer, educator and indeed architect for Paepcke's Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (later The Aspen Institute), which promulgated the very Bauhaus project to encourage cooperation between art and industry and the role of the arts in society. From 1965 he fulfilled a similar role in advising Robert O. Anderson, chairman of the Atlantic Richfield Company.
His work is represented in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, Schubladen Museum, Bern, Switzerland, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
In August 2019 The Aspen Institute announced a major donation by Stewart and Lynda Resnick for the creation of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies. This will allow the Institute to showcase and exhibit its Bayer works, grow its collection, borrow from major cultural institutions, and create new exhibitions that will educate the public about Bayer’s remarkable legacy. The center opened in the spring of 2022.
In 1928 Bayer moved to Berlin together with several members of the Bauhaus staff including Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer. He found work as a freelance graphic designer, particularly with German Vogue, under its art director Agha. When the latter returned to Paris, Bayer joined the staff full time, and also worked increasingly with Dorland, the magazine's principal advertising agency. It was in the period from 1928 to his emigration to America in 1938 that he developed his unique vision as an artist, combining a strongly modernist aesthetic sense with a rare ability to convey meaning clearly and directly. This seamless combination of art, craft and design mark Bayer as true prophet of Bauhaus theories.
Bayer followed Gropius to America in 1938, and set his breadth of skills to work later that year in designing the landmark Bauhaus 1918-1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Bayer flourished in New York as a designer and architect, but it was his meeting with the industrialist Walter Paepcke in 1946 that allowed him to harness his concepts of 'total design' to the postwar boom. Paepcke was developing Aspen as a cultural and intellectual destination, and found in Bayer the perfect collaborator. Bayer was designer, educator and indeed architect for Paepcke's Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (later The Aspen Institute), which promulgated the very Bauhaus project to encourage cooperation between art and industry and the role of the arts in society. From 1965 he fulfilled a similar role in advising Robert O. Anderson, chairman of the Atlantic Richfield Company.
His work is represented in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, Schubladen Museum, Bern, Switzerland, Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City.
In August 2019 The Aspen Institute announced a major donation by Stewart and Lynda Resnick for the creation of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies. This will allow the Institute to showcase and exhibit its Bayer works, grow its collection, borrow from major cultural institutions, and create new exhibitions that will educate the public about Bayer’s remarkable legacy. The center opened in the spring of 2022.
Larry Bell Larry Bell is a painter and sculptor whose works blur the boundary between artwork, viewer, and environment through the use of reflective materials that warp the perceived space of the work. Raised in Chicago, IL, Bell attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, CA, from 1957 to 1959, where he began experimenting with geometric forms and unusual materials. His early paintings often employed mirrored glass to create a disorienting relationship between viewer and object, as viewers could identify their reflection within the work. Discouraged by the limitations of two-dimensional art, Bell began making fragmented mirror boxes, which created an early precedent for his mature sculptures consisting of pure glass cubes.
In 1966, Bell obtained a vacuum-coating machine that he used to produce cubes on an even larger scale, which he mounted on a Plexiglas base. These larger works foreshadowed his later interest in making site-specific art for outdoor spaces. In addition to his sculptures, Bell did eventually return to the two-dimensional format, using film deposition technology to create his famed mirage works and vapor drawings.
Bell has maintained a studio in Venice, CA, for many years, even after his move to Taos, NM. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., as well as by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bell’s work is represented in major collections worldwide, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Tate Gallery in London, UK.
In 1966, Bell obtained a vacuum-coating machine that he used to produce cubes on an even larger scale, which he mounted on a Plexiglas base. These larger works foreshadowed his later interest in making site-specific art for outdoor spaces. In addition to his sculptures, Bell did eventually return to the two-dimensional format, using film deposition technology to create his famed mirage works and vapor drawings.
Bell has maintained a studio in Venice, CA, for many years, even after his move to Taos, NM. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., as well as by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Bell’s work is represented in major collections worldwide, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Tate Gallery in London, UK.
Thomas Benrimo Thomas Benrimo was born in San Francisco in 1887 and became one of the most significant and widely known members of the Taos Modernists. Benrimo received no formal art education until he joined the Art Students League of New York. There, he was particularly influenced by the modernist paintings at the 1913 Armory Show. Benrimo worked as a designer of theater sets and as a commercial artist for many years. He also taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1935-1939 before moving to Taos, New Mexico in 1939.
Over the course of his career, Benrimo’s work moved from strong Cubist and Surrealist influences to a more abstract style. Benrimo believed that "abstract art departs from reality and nature only to draw far-reaching conclusions about reality. A legitimate abstract work of art can be produced only on the basis of a profound knowledge of nature." His work was thus profoundly influenced by, but not derivative of, the stark, colorful landscapes of the Southwest. He lived and painted in Taos until his death in 1958.
Benrimo’s work was included in the 1954 “Younger American Artists” show at the Guggenheim Museum, and has been exhibited all over the world, including shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is also included in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum, among other public and private collections.
Over the course of his career, Benrimo’s work moved from strong Cubist and Surrealist influences to a more abstract style. Benrimo believed that "abstract art departs from reality and nature only to draw far-reaching conclusions about reality. A legitimate abstract work of art can be produced only on the basis of a profound knowledge of nature." His work was thus profoundly influenced by, but not derivative of, the stark, colorful landscapes of the Southwest. He lived and painted in Taos until his death in 1958.
Benrimo’s work was included in the 1954 “Younger American Artists” show at the Guggenheim Museum, and has been exhibited all over the world, including shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is also included in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum, among other public and private collections.
Fletcher Benton Fletcher Benton (American, b.1931), born in Jackson, OH, moved to San Francisco in the 1960s after receiving a BFA from Miami University, Oxford, OH, in 1956. In San Francisco, he taught at California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, and California State University. In his own work, he focused on geometric associations that are apparent in his later, large-scale sculptural works. Benton taught himself sign painting as a young man, and, through this process, became enthralled with the inherent geometric forms that comprise the letters he was painting. Benton initially experimented with abstract painting, but the limitations of the medium drove him toward kinetic sculpture.
Throughout his oeuvre, Benton plays with shapes, lines, balance, and movement to create gravity-defying sculptures of all sizes, as well as abstract geometric works on paper. Benton began his celebrated Alphabet series—comprised of 26 large-scale steel sculptures of the letters of the alphabet—in the 1970s, and the kinetic aspect of his sculptures became less important than its form and medium. In his manipulation of a two-dimensional sheet of metal into a three-dimensional painted steel sculpture, Benton brought a particular life to these letters, imbuing these stationary pieces with the kinetic energy found in his earlier work. In 2008, Benton received the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
His work has been widely exhibited since the 1950s, and can be found in the permanent collections of numerous museums and corporations, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Guggenheim, Las Vegas, Nevada; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Kröller-Müller Museum and Sculpture Garden, Otterlo, the Netherlands; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Throughout his oeuvre, Benton plays with shapes, lines, balance, and movement to create gravity-defying sculptures of all sizes, as well as abstract geometric works on paper. Benton began his celebrated Alphabet series—comprised of 26 large-scale steel sculptures of the letters of the alphabet—in the 1970s, and the kinetic aspect of his sculptures became less important than its form and medium. In his manipulation of a two-dimensional sheet of metal into a three-dimensional painted steel sculpture, Benton brought a particular life to these letters, imbuing these stationary pieces with the kinetic energy found in his earlier work. In 2008, Benton received the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
His work has been widely exhibited since the 1950s, and can be found in the permanent collections of numerous museums and corporations, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Guggenheim, Las Vegas, Nevada; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Kröller-Müller Museum and Sculpture Garden, Otterlo, the Netherlands; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leon Berkowitz Leon Berkowitz (1911-1987)was born on 14 September 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents Yettie (née Pries) and Bernard Berkowitz, Hasidic immigrants from Hungary.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, the Art Students League of New York, the Corcoran College of Art and Design (where he later taught), and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
During World War II between 1943 to 1945, Berkowitz served in the United States Army and was stationed in Virginia, where he served as an art therapist to psychiatric patients and became familiar with the psychological methodologies of Gestalt and Rorschach. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institute, Berkowitz recalled that “What I learned from the Rorschach was that it wasn’t the symbols that people saw, it was the abstract qualities that they saw, that were diagnostic, you know, a couple of colors, a concern with edges or the hole….all of these things supported the development of my own aesthetic.”
With his first wife, the poet Ida Fox Berkowitz, and artist Helmut Kern, Leon Berkowitz established the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in 1945 (also known as the Workshop Art Center or Washington Workshop Center for the Arts). This Center became a cultural catalyst in the city, bringing together leaders in both the performing and visual arts, including painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis, who would later become well-known founders of the Washington Color School group.
He was often associated with the Color School painters, though he adamantly denied this connection, publicly noting his commitment to the poetics of color and the influence of poetry, music, and physics in his work over the more formalistic concerns of the group.
The Workshop Center closed in 1956, and Berkowitz and his wife spent much of the next decade traveling and living abroad, using that time to further his artistic and spiritual explorations. He painted and exhibited in England, Spain, Greece, Wales, and Jerusalem.
Recalling his time in Spain, Berkowitz told the Smithsonian, "I think there is where I really found myself. ..There in Spain, I discovered my own isolation.... I’d absorbed a great deal. The great question in my mind was whether I had found my own voice. In Spain I came to realize that I had.”
Returning permanently to Washington in 1964, he joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art. He was promoted to head of the Painting Department in 1969.
By the end of 1966, he embarked on the Cathedrals series. As art critic Sarah E. Fensom writes,
"In these works he 'essentialized' the vertical, painting vertical bands of glowing color that seem to surge off the canvas.... In Cathedrals, the bands of color are painted on either side of a thin, cake-sliver-like white triangle. This slender wedge, wrote James F. Pilgrim,... acts as a symbolic light source. Pilgrim wrote, 'Light seems to move laterally from this core, creating changes in color intensity,' but he added parenthetically that 'the changes actually result from light reflecting through various densities of pigment.' Berkowitz’s real light source was the canvas itself."
“I try to explore it in all its possibilities, the vertical as a cause and result of the color, the shape of the canvas a cause and result of its ascent and inner verticality,” Berkowitz said.
Much of Berkowitz's work is a reaction to the work of the Abstract Expressionist School in New York. Berkowitz was never comfortable with the abstract expressionist painters' dependence on internal psychological states. Berkowitz felt he needed to take inspiration from some external authority, rather than an exclusively internal one. In Berkowitz's own words, "I wanted to work in direct response to nature".
Berkowitz's later paintings marry form and structure with color and light. As light penetrates through the layers of thinly applied paint, crystalline structures emerge. As
Fensom explains:
"In Berkowitz’s work, there is no spraying or seeping of pigment—and later, hardly any use of shape. Instead the artist developed a method in the late 1960s in which he used large brushes to sweep on a mixture of 10 percent oil paint and 90 percent turpentine. He allowed each layer to dry thoroughly—sometimes using rags or blow dryers—before applying another. He usually applied some 30 to 40 edgeless layers. In the 1970s Berkowitz said, 'I have continued to develop this method to a point where I can distribute the fragments of pigment both in extension and depth, resulting in an additive mixture of colored light. The color is therefore seen in space and changes with the solar spectrum as day moves into night.' This creates what he calls a “dynamic form”—something that doesn’t exist in Color School pictures."
Berkowitz restores to color a "depth of vision" in his best work, and in those depths the viewer discovers the natural forms in the universe - sea, sky, and earth.
In a statement for an exhibition of his work at The Phillips Collection in 1976 he said, “I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color.”
Berkowitz's paintings are included in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; James Michener Collection, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Golda Meir Collection, Jerusalem.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, the Art Students League of New York, the Corcoran College of Art and Design (where he later taught), and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
During World War II between 1943 to 1945, Berkowitz served in the United States Army and was stationed in Virginia, where he served as an art therapist to psychiatric patients and became familiar with the psychological methodologies of Gestalt and Rorschach. In an interview with the Smithsonian Institute, Berkowitz recalled that “What I learned from the Rorschach was that it wasn’t the symbols that people saw, it was the abstract qualities that they saw, that were diagnostic, you know, a couple of colors, a concern with edges or the hole….all of these things supported the development of my own aesthetic.”
With his first wife, the poet Ida Fox Berkowitz, and artist Helmut Kern, Leon Berkowitz established the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in 1945 (also known as the Workshop Art Center or Washington Workshop Center for the Arts). This Center became a cultural catalyst in the city, bringing together leaders in both the performing and visual arts, including painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis, who would later become well-known founders of the Washington Color School group.
He was often associated with the Color School painters, though he adamantly denied this connection, publicly noting his commitment to the poetics of color and the influence of poetry, music, and physics in his work over the more formalistic concerns of the group.
The Workshop Center closed in 1956, and Berkowitz and his wife spent much of the next decade traveling and living abroad, using that time to further his artistic and spiritual explorations. He painted and exhibited in England, Spain, Greece, Wales, and Jerusalem.
Recalling his time in Spain, Berkowitz told the Smithsonian, "I think there is where I really found myself. ..There in Spain, I discovered my own isolation.... I’d absorbed a great deal. The great question in my mind was whether I had found my own voice. In Spain I came to realize that I had.”
Returning permanently to Washington in 1964, he joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art. He was promoted to head of the Painting Department in 1969.
By the end of 1966, he embarked on the Cathedrals series. As art critic Sarah E. Fensom writes,
"In these works he 'essentialized' the vertical, painting vertical bands of glowing color that seem to surge off the canvas.... In Cathedrals, the bands of color are painted on either side of a thin, cake-sliver-like white triangle. This slender wedge, wrote James F. Pilgrim,... acts as a symbolic light source. Pilgrim wrote, 'Light seems to move laterally from this core, creating changes in color intensity,' but he added parenthetically that 'the changes actually result from light reflecting through various densities of pigment.' Berkowitz’s real light source was the canvas itself."
“I try to explore it in all its possibilities, the vertical as a cause and result of the color, the shape of the canvas a cause and result of its ascent and inner verticality,” Berkowitz said.
Much of Berkowitz's work is a reaction to the work of the Abstract Expressionist School in New York. Berkowitz was never comfortable with the abstract expressionist painters' dependence on internal psychological states. Berkowitz felt he needed to take inspiration from some external authority, rather than an exclusively internal one. In Berkowitz's own words, "I wanted to work in direct response to nature".
Berkowitz's later paintings marry form and structure with color and light. As light penetrates through the layers of thinly applied paint, crystalline structures emerge. As
Fensom explains:
"In Berkowitz’s work, there is no spraying or seeping of pigment—and later, hardly any use of shape. Instead the artist developed a method in the late 1960s in which he used large brushes to sweep on a mixture of 10 percent oil paint and 90 percent turpentine. He allowed each layer to dry thoroughly—sometimes using rags or blow dryers—before applying another. He usually applied some 30 to 40 edgeless layers. In the 1970s Berkowitz said, 'I have continued to develop this method to a point where I can distribute the fragments of pigment both in extension and depth, resulting in an additive mixture of colored light. The color is therefore seen in space and changes with the solar spectrum as day moves into night.' This creates what he calls a “dynamic form”—something that doesn’t exist in Color School pictures."
Berkowitz restores to color a "depth of vision" in his best work, and in those depths the viewer discovers the natural forms in the universe - sea, sky, and earth.
In a statement for an exhibition of his work at The Phillips Collection in 1976 he said, “I am endeavoring to find that blush of light over light and the color within the light; the depths through which we see when we look into and not at color.”
Berkowitz's paintings are included in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; James Michener Collection, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Golda Meir Collection, Jerusalem.
Oscar Bernach While biographical records are sparse, Bernarch was a 20th-century Mexican artist primarily known for his contribution to the "Neo-Naive" or primitive school of Mexican folk art, and worked within the same aesthetic circle as Agapito Labios (1898–1996). He was most prolific during the mid-20th century, specifically the 1940s and 1950s.
The style sought to reclaim the charm of 19th-century provincial portraits, characterized by flat perspectives, stiff frontal poses, and idealized, doll-like features in children.
The style sought to reclaim the charm of 19th-century provincial portraits, characterized by flat perspectives, stiff frontal poses, and idealized, doll-like features in children.
Earl Biss “My paintings might suggest a harmony of man and nature, a combining of rigid line and free flowing spontaneity, bubbling with rich color with the disciplined design of the hard edge technique. I am not concerned with capturing the outward image of nature, but rather those powers or forces of nature which play such an important part or basis for the way things are. A concept of reality drawn from spontaneous abstractions, and controlled with the subtlety I wield as the creator.” —Earl Biss, 1995
Earl Biss, Absaroke (Crow), was born September 29, 1947, in Renton, Washington; he was raised by his grandmother at Crow Agency, Montana, and at Yakima, Washington. He contracted rheumatic fever at age eight and instead of the usual boyhood activities, he started drawing and painting. Biss’s first oils were done at age twelve, but his formal training did not start until age sixteen at the then-new Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he studied jewelry and three-dimensional art from 1963 – 1965. After graduation, Biss received a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied oil painting.
As an artist, Biss expressed much of his emotional turmoil, embodied by his mystical, melting landscapes and people, while still admiring and studying old European masters. As a student of Fritz Scholder at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he was exposed early in his training to the style of Abstract Expressionism as a creative and emotional outlet. As an Absaroke (Crow) Indian artist and benefactor, he was admired for his professionalism, business sense, and compassion for the Absaroke people.
Earl Biss, Absaroke (Crow), was born September 29, 1947, in Renton, Washington; he was raised by his grandmother at Crow Agency, Montana, and at Yakima, Washington. He contracted rheumatic fever at age eight and instead of the usual boyhood activities, he started drawing and painting. Biss’s first oils were done at age twelve, but his formal training did not start until age sixteen at the then-new Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he studied jewelry and three-dimensional art from 1963 – 1965. After graduation, Biss received a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied oil painting.
As an artist, Biss expressed much of his emotional turmoil, embodied by his mystical, melting landscapes and people, while still admiring and studying old European masters. As a student of Fritz Scholder at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he was exposed early in his training to the style of Abstract Expressionism as a creative and emotional outlet. As an Absaroke (Crow) Indian artist and benefactor, he was admired for his professionalism, business sense, and compassion for the Absaroke people.
Emil James Bisttram Emil Bisttram was born in Hungary in 1895 and immigrated to America with his family in 1906. He began working with commercial art at a young age, first working as a lettering and cover designer for shops and catalogues before opening his own commercial art studio with three of his colleagues. While running his successful art studio, Bisttram pursued his study of fine art with night classes at the National Academy of Art and Design, the Cooper Union, Parson’s School of Design and the Art Students League, where he studied under such well-known artists as Ivan Olinski, DeLeftwich Dodge, Howard Giles, and Leon Kroll.
It was during this time that he first became acquainted with Jay Hambidge’s artistic philosophy of Dynamic Symmetry – a methodology of proportion and design that influenced Bisttram’s work throughout his career. In 1920, he began teaching at Parson’s School of Design, where he remained until 1925. It was around this time that he was invited by the Russian artist Nicholas Konstantin Roerich to visit his Master Institute of United Arts – Roerich’s personal project to unify different art forms, such as music, dance, fine art, and drama. Roerich’s mystical spirituality, interest in the occult, and philosophy of serving humanity through the arts were profound influences on Bisttram’s own spiritual and philosophical development. Bisttram’s fascination with mysticism and spirituality were also influenced by his discovery of Vassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art.
Bisttram paid his first visit to Santa Fe in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he traveled to Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship to study mural painting with Diego Rivera. In 1932, he settled in Taos. As a result of his new age philosophy and modern artistic ideas, Bisttram was received by Taos’ community of traditional and regional artists with ambivalence. Nonetheless, Bisttram lost no time making his mark there. During his first year in Taos, he opened the Taos Art School, later known as the Bisttram School of Fine Art. He also founded Taos’ first commercial art gallery, the Heptagon Gallery. In the next several years, Bisttram received several significant mural commissions, including one for the Taos Court House and another for the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C., for which he painted a heroic depiction of the liberation of women, a cause in which he believed strongly.
Though Bisttram continued to paint representational works – particularly portraits and depictions of Native American ceremonies and dances which were strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists – his work became increasingly abstract. His development into abstraction was strongly influenced by Native American geometric designs and symbolism. Bisttram was particularly fascinated with the way Native American artists were able to depict the natural world using symbols.
In 1938, Emil Bisttram and his close friend, Raymond Jonson, co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. Along with Pelton, Bisttram was particularly devoted to exploring spirituality through art. Bisttram believed that art had the potential to lead an individual to a transcendental experience by speaking in “an esoteric language more easily felt than explained” (Wiggins 1988; 9). Along with his mentors Kandinsky and Roerich, Bisttram never lost his conviction that an individual could discover transcendent truths about the universe through the practice of art.
Bisttram continued to be a prominent member of the Taos art community. In 1952, he helped to found the Taos Artists Association, along with artists such as Ernest Blumenschein and Joseph Fleck. He exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, including one-man exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
His work is included in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other public and private collections.
Sources and Further Reading: Wiggins, Walt. The Transcendental Art of Emil Bisttram. Ruidoso Downs, NM: Pintores Press, 1988.
It was during this time that he first became acquainted with Jay Hambidge’s artistic philosophy of Dynamic Symmetry – a methodology of proportion and design that influenced Bisttram’s work throughout his career. In 1920, he began teaching at Parson’s School of Design, where he remained until 1925. It was around this time that he was invited by the Russian artist Nicholas Konstantin Roerich to visit his Master Institute of United Arts – Roerich’s personal project to unify different art forms, such as music, dance, fine art, and drama. Roerich’s mystical spirituality, interest in the occult, and philosophy of serving humanity through the arts were profound influences on Bisttram’s own spiritual and philosophical development. Bisttram’s fascination with mysticism and spirituality were also influenced by his discovery of Vassily Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art.
Bisttram paid his first visit to Santa Fe in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he traveled to Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship to study mural painting with Diego Rivera. In 1932, he settled in Taos. As a result of his new age philosophy and modern artistic ideas, Bisttram was received by Taos’ community of traditional and regional artists with ambivalence. Nonetheless, Bisttram lost no time making his mark there. During his first year in Taos, he opened the Taos Art School, later known as the Bisttram School of Fine Art. He also founded Taos’ first commercial art gallery, the Heptagon Gallery. In the next several years, Bisttram received several significant mural commissions, including one for the Taos Court House and another for the Justice Department building in Washington, D.C., for which he painted a heroic depiction of the liberation of women, a cause in which he believed strongly.
Though Bisttram continued to paint representational works – particularly portraits and depictions of Native American ceremonies and dances which were strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists – his work became increasingly abstract. His development into abstraction was strongly influenced by Native American geometric designs and symbolism. Bisttram was particularly fascinated with the way Native American artists were able to depict the natural world using symbols.
In 1938, Emil Bisttram and his close friend, Raymond Jonson, co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. Along with Pelton, Bisttram was particularly devoted to exploring spirituality through art. Bisttram believed that art had the potential to lead an individual to a transcendental experience by speaking in “an esoteric language more easily felt than explained” (Wiggins 1988; 9). Along with his mentors Kandinsky and Roerich, Bisttram never lost his conviction that an individual could discover transcendent truths about the universe through the practice of art.
Bisttram continued to be a prominent member of the Taos art community. In 1952, he helped to found the Taos Artists Association, along with artists such as Ernest Blumenschein and Joseph Fleck. He exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, including one-man exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
His work is included in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among other public and private collections.
Sources and Further Reading: Wiggins, Walt. The Transcendental Art of Emil Bisttram. Ruidoso Downs, NM: Pintores Press, 1988.
Art Brenner Art Brenner, a prolific painter, sculptor, and scholarly writer, was born in New York City in 1924.
Beginning as a painter, his work evolved in a direction that unavoidably led to sculpture. To devote himself to this new development, in 1964 he left New York for Paris where he lived and worked for over forty years. He died in Adelaide, Australia in 2013.
Brenner’s first solo show was held in 1967 at the Galerie Lucien Durand in Paris. From then on his work garnered critical acclaim and success, with numerous solo and group exhibitions in cities such as Paris, London, Avignon, Barcelona, Brussels, Brest, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Montreal, and Adelaide, Australia.
Brenner exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in numerous countries for over 36 years, and participated in more than 60 exhibitions throughout his career. He also received the highest honor as a “Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”(“Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters”) in France, bestowed upon individuals who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the world of art, culture and literature and their contribution to the influence of arts in France and the throughout the world.
He had a long and prestigious career, and continued exhibiting into his nineties. In 1995 he was the subject of a CNN film titled “An American Sculptor in Paris.”
One of his best-known articles, entitled “Concerning Sculpture and Architecture”, explores the relationship between modern architecture and sculpture. Brenner suggests that monumentality in sculpture was a direct product of Modernist thinking in architecture, and uses this as a call for architects and sculptors to collaborate to create public spaces that are not merely functional, but aesthetically satisfying environments for living. Brenner heeded his own call, and has continued to collaborate with architects to create incredible works in public spaces, and in conjunction with various building projects around the world.
Though best known for his sculptural work, and written essays and articles on the changing nature of sculpture in society, Brenner was also an astonishingly capable painter. His works created in the 1950s reflect the Abstract Expressionist movement of the time. Although part of that oeuvre, his style is hard to pigeonhole. He clearly has a spatial sensibility to his canvases, but his color is careful, and unflinchingly unique. His works from that time are gestural, with controlled but choppy swaths of color whispering and interrupting each other, creating a vibrant plane of conversation on the canvas. Though they are reminiscent of many other painters of the time, such as Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Edward Dugmore, John Grillo and even Alma Thomas among others, Brenner brought a spatial awareness that was a departure point for his future years and his life’s devotion to sculpture.
Art Brenner’s work is present in various public collections and public spaces in Europe and the United States, particularly in France at the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC) Paris and Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Meudon and also the Art sur l’Autoroute, Spain; the Rose Museum, Waltham, MA; tjhe Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn; and the Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, Alaska, anmong others.
His work is also present in numerous private collections in France, Germany, Spain, the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Beginning as a painter, his work evolved in a direction that unavoidably led to sculpture. To devote himself to this new development, in 1964 he left New York for Paris where he lived and worked for over forty years. He died in Adelaide, Australia in 2013.
Brenner’s first solo show was held in 1967 at the Galerie Lucien Durand in Paris. From then on his work garnered critical acclaim and success, with numerous solo and group exhibitions in cities such as Paris, London, Avignon, Barcelona, Brussels, Brest, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Montreal, and Adelaide, Australia.
Brenner exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in numerous countries for over 36 years, and participated in more than 60 exhibitions throughout his career. He also received the highest honor as a “Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”(“Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters”) in France, bestowed upon individuals who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the world of art, culture and literature and their contribution to the influence of arts in France and the throughout the world.
He had a long and prestigious career, and continued exhibiting into his nineties. In 1995 he was the subject of a CNN film titled “An American Sculptor in Paris.”
One of his best-known articles, entitled “Concerning Sculpture and Architecture”, explores the relationship between modern architecture and sculpture. Brenner suggests that monumentality in sculpture was a direct product of Modernist thinking in architecture, and uses this as a call for architects and sculptors to collaborate to create public spaces that are not merely functional, but aesthetically satisfying environments for living. Brenner heeded his own call, and has continued to collaborate with architects to create incredible works in public spaces, and in conjunction with various building projects around the world.
Though best known for his sculptural work, and written essays and articles on the changing nature of sculpture in society, Brenner was also an astonishingly capable painter. His works created in the 1950s reflect the Abstract Expressionist movement of the time. Although part of that oeuvre, his style is hard to pigeonhole. He clearly has a spatial sensibility to his canvases, but his color is careful, and unflinchingly unique. His works from that time are gestural, with controlled but choppy swaths of color whispering and interrupting each other, creating a vibrant plane of conversation on the canvas. Though they are reminiscent of many other painters of the time, such as Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm, Edward Dugmore, John Grillo and even Alma Thomas among others, Brenner brought a spatial awareness that was a departure point for his future years and his life’s devotion to sculpture.
Art Brenner’s work is present in various public collections and public spaces in Europe and the United States, particularly in France at the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC) Paris and Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Meudon and also the Art sur l’Autoroute, Spain; the Rose Museum, Waltham, MA; tjhe Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn; and the Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, Alaska, anmong others.
His work is also present in numerous private collections in France, Germany, Spain, the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Dorothy Eugenie Brett A key figure in 20th century New Mexico artistic circles, Dorothy Eugénie Brett (10 November 1883 – 27 August 1977) was an Anglo-American painter, remembered as much for her social life as for her art.
Dorothy Brett was born to an aristocratic London family and educated in the court of Queen Victoria. The family lived near Windsor and had homes in London and at Callander in Perthshire, Scotland, where Dorothy spent days fishing in the River Teith and nearby Loch Lubnaig.
In 1910 she attended the Slade School of Art, where she studied until 1916. For some time, she occupied a studio on the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where she became a part of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury group, along with Dora Carrington, Barbara Hiles and others. There, she became acquainted with many prominent English figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence, several of whose portraits she painted.
During this period, Brett became deaf and is often remembered for the brass ear-trumpet she carried along with her.
In 1924, Brett traveled with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to visit Taos, New Mexico at the invitation of the prominent Taos society figure Mabel Dodge Luhan and to stay with her. Initially, they all got along well, "but tensions gradually built ... [and] Mabel, in a burst of generosity (and probably to keep Lawrence in Taos) offered Lawrence a tract of 160 acres on her ranch" located some twenty miles northwest of Taos (Bachrach). The property has been known as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch ever since its acquisition by the University of New Mexico in the 1950s.
The trio settled at the ranch in May or June of 1924 and Brett took the smaller of the two cabins on the property. She spent much of her time there painting or typing Lawrence’s manuscripts. After the Lawrences left in 1925, Brett lived alone on the ranch in poverty for several years, surviving by selling her paintings of Pueblo Indians to tourists. Over time, however, her work began to attract attention.
In Taos, Brett became a close friend of the well-known art patron Millicent Rogers. Rogers played a significant role in Brett’s artistic career, buying and arranging exhibitions of her works. Rogers was responsible for Brett’s first solo exhibition in New York at the American British Art Gallery in 1950. Later that year, one of Brett’s works was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She became a United States citizen in 1938 and in later life was admired as one of the leading personalities of Taos.
Though Brett had a formal artistic education, she abandoned academic and landscape painting upon her arrival in New Mexico and began to paint Indian subjects. Brett had been fascinated by Indian dances and ceremonials since attending Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in London at the age of five. She traveled with Millicent Rogers to view and paint Indian dances.
Her works are romantic and symbolic in nature, emphasizing her impressions of the Indians’ mysticism and spirituality. In her works, she sought to “paint the…Indian’s attitude towards life and the world around him. The Indian as he thinks and feels about himself…, the spirit of a Race, the Life behind the Life of a people” (Porter et. al. 1998: 295). According to Brett, her destiny was to “come all this way from England to find and give the Red Indian his hidden life on canvas”(Ibid).
Selected exhibitions include the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC, 1932; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1950; University of Illinois, 1953; and the American-British Art Club, 1950.
Brett's works are in the collections of Tate Britain, London, UK; Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, NY; the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; ther Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN; and theJonson Gallery of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, among others.
Dorothy Brett was born to an aristocratic London family and educated in the court of Queen Victoria. The family lived near Windsor and had homes in London and at Callander in Perthshire, Scotland, where Dorothy spent days fishing in the River Teith and nearby Loch Lubnaig.
In 1910 she attended the Slade School of Art, where she studied until 1916. For some time, she occupied a studio on the estate of Lady Ottoline Morrell, where she became a part of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury group, along with Dora Carrington, Barbara Hiles and others. There, she became acquainted with many prominent English figures, such as Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and D.H. Lawrence, several of whose portraits she painted.
During this period, Brett became deaf and is often remembered for the brass ear-trumpet she carried along with her.
In 1924, Brett traveled with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda to visit Taos, New Mexico at the invitation of the prominent Taos society figure Mabel Dodge Luhan and to stay with her. Initially, they all got along well, "but tensions gradually built ... [and] Mabel, in a burst of generosity (and probably to keep Lawrence in Taos) offered Lawrence a tract of 160 acres on her ranch" located some twenty miles northwest of Taos (Bachrach). The property has been known as the D. H. Lawrence Ranch ever since its acquisition by the University of New Mexico in the 1950s.
The trio settled at the ranch in May or June of 1924 and Brett took the smaller of the two cabins on the property. She spent much of her time there painting or typing Lawrence’s manuscripts. After the Lawrences left in 1925, Brett lived alone on the ranch in poverty for several years, surviving by selling her paintings of Pueblo Indians to tourists. Over time, however, her work began to attract attention.
In Taos, Brett became a close friend of the well-known art patron Millicent Rogers. Rogers played a significant role in Brett’s artistic career, buying and arranging exhibitions of her works. Rogers was responsible for Brett’s first solo exhibition in New York at the American British Art Gallery in 1950. Later that year, one of Brett’s works was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
She became a United States citizen in 1938 and in later life was admired as one of the leading personalities of Taos.
Though Brett had a formal artistic education, she abandoned academic and landscape painting upon her arrival in New Mexico and began to paint Indian subjects. Brett had been fascinated by Indian dances and ceremonials since attending Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in London at the age of five. She traveled with Millicent Rogers to view and paint Indian dances.
Her works are romantic and symbolic in nature, emphasizing her impressions of the Indians’ mysticism and spirituality. In her works, she sought to “paint the…Indian’s attitude towards life and the world around him. The Indian as he thinks and feels about himself…, the spirit of a Race, the Life behind the Life of a people” (Porter et. al. 1998: 295). According to Brett, her destiny was to “come all this way from England to find and give the Red Indian his hidden life on canvas”(Ibid).
Selected exhibitions include the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC, 1932; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, 1950; University of Illinois, 1953; and the American-British Art Club, 1950.
Brett's works are in the collections of Tate Britain, London, UK; Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Buffalo Museum of Science, Buffalo, NY; the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; ther Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN; and theJonson Gallery of University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, among others.
George W.W. Brewster Born in the Boston area, George W.W. Brewster graduated from Harvard’s School of Design. Shortly thereafter, he began a career in architecture, briefly working with others and then heading his own firm, which generated both regional and national acclaim, including a very public commendation by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Brewster was born in 1907. While his Boston birth record shows only Wales as a middle name, he was -- or became -- in fact George Washington Wales Brewster, Jr., his name echoing that of his surgeon father.
George married Joan Ryerson during the heart of the Depression. A graduate of Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard, he became an architect of considerable skill and reputation, studying first at MIT and then Harvard Architectural School; during his student years in the 1930s, he worked for Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott; William Lescaze; and William T. Aldrich.
By 1938, he had established his own office on Boston's Newbury Street. A document of the Brookline Preservation Commission notes that he "designed a variety of houses, in a modern and New England idiom"; that he "won the BSA prize in 1935 and the Boston Arts Festival First Award in 1954 for the J. Gordon Gibbs House" in the town of Marion; and that he received other awards in the mid-1950s.
Having intended to study painting in college, he returned to his passion, closing his architectural firm in the 1960s. He studied under Barbara Swann in Boston and developed a distinctive semi-abstract style, predominantly portraying landscapes which combine elements of land, shore, water and sky.
His paintings are in the Farnsworth Museum, Portland Museum, and Harvard University as well as in many private collections in the United States.
George W. W. Brewster passed away in February of 1981.
Brewster was born in 1907. While his Boston birth record shows only Wales as a middle name, he was -- or became -- in fact George Washington Wales Brewster, Jr., his name echoing that of his surgeon father.
George married Joan Ryerson during the heart of the Depression. A graduate of Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard, he became an architect of considerable skill and reputation, studying first at MIT and then Harvard Architectural School; during his student years in the 1930s, he worked for Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch & Abbott; William Lescaze; and William T. Aldrich.
By 1938, he had established his own office on Boston's Newbury Street. A document of the Brookline Preservation Commission notes that he "designed a variety of houses, in a modern and New England idiom"; that he "won the BSA prize in 1935 and the Boston Arts Festival First Award in 1954 for the J. Gordon Gibbs House" in the town of Marion; and that he received other awards in the mid-1950s.
Having intended to study painting in college, he returned to his passion, closing his architectural firm in the 1960s. He studied under Barbara Swann in Boston and developed a distinctive semi-abstract style, predominantly portraying landscapes which combine elements of land, shore, water and sky.
His paintings are in the Farnsworth Museum, Portland Museum, and Harvard University as well as in many private collections in the United States.
George W. W. Brewster passed away in February of 1981.
James Brooks James Brooks began his career as a Social Realist artist, but later adopted an abstract style and became associated with the so-called New York School and the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Born October 18, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Brooks moved around as a child, because his father was a traveling salesman. He lived in Oklahoma City and Shawnee, Oklahoma, and Denver, Colorado, before settling with his family in Dallas, Texas, where he attended high school and began his formal study of art at Southern Methodist University from 1923-1925. After he left college, he continued his artistic training with Martha Simkins, a former student of William Merritt Chase. In 1926, Brooks relocated to New York City, where he enrolled in night classes at The Art Students League, studying with Kimon Nicolaides and Boardman Robinson. He supported himself by working as a commercial letterer. After completing three years of art school, he spent half the year in his job as a letterer in New York and the other six months traveling in the west and southwest, painting pictures in a Social Realist style. At this time, Brooks began to exhibit his prints and paintings in group shows at the Midtown Galleries and at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
From 1936 to 1942, working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in New York, Brooks executed several murals, including the celebrated "Flight," 1942, an episodic history of the effort to fly on the walls of the lobby of the International Marine Terminal Building at La Guardia Airport (now the Delta Air Lines Terminal). During the Second World War, he served in the United States Army as a combat artist in Egypt and in the Near East, creating images of daily army life and of the destruction wrought by the war. After serving abroad from 1942-1945, he was reassigned to the presentation division of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in Washington, D.C.
After the war, he returned to New York City to resume painting and reconnected with several old friends from his WPA days, including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. He began to see a great deal of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock and went to live in their old studio on Eighth Street after they moved permanently to the Springs, Long Island. Pollock frequently stayed with Brooks on trips to Manhattan, and Brooks spent his summers in Montauk beginning in 1949. At this time, his work became increasingly abstract, revealing the influence of Synthetic Cubism and the imagery of Arshile Gorky.
While painting in Maine in the summer of 1948, Brooks had an artistic breakthrough. He discovered that the glue paste he used to attach his paper to canvas accidentally bled through to the side with his images. He started to exploit this staining technique, moving beyond the more rigid format of his Cubist-inspired compositions. In addition, he relied more heavily on automatism and free brushwork, creating images that showed the influence of Pollock's action painting methods.
Beginning in the 1950s, while continuing to construct multi-layered canvases filled with small, irregular shapes and thin, fluid lines, Brooks transformed the surface of his pictures. He experimented with the thinning and drying of the medium and with applying mixtures of commercial enamels and oils directly from the tube to create a matte surface and to limit the viscosity of the pigment. From the 1960s on, Brooks simplified his compositions, abandoning the densely packed character of his earlier works. Color, however, remained a consistent and essential ingredient in his pictures, and he frequently started with colored grounds rather than plain white canvas. As the art historian Lisa Mintz Messinger observes, "It is interesting to note that Brooks's Long Island home, which he shares with his wife, the artist Charlotte Park, is filled with delightful and unexpected accents of bright color. White walls and white furniture are juxtaposed against painted wooden floors of mustard yellow, green, and blue and painted yellow ceiling beams." (1)
From 1947 to 1975, Brooks taught as a way to supplement his income. His teaching appointments included instructor in drawing at Columbia University, New York (1946-1948); instructor in lettering at the Pratt Institute, New York (1948-1955); visiting critic at Yale University, New Haven (1955-1960) and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1971-1972); and Andrew Carnegie Visiting Professor of Art at Cooper Union, New York (1975). He also was artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1963 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.
In 1949, Brooks had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. This exhibition was followed by numerous shows in New York at the Stable Gallery, the Kootz Gallery, and the Martha Jackson Gallery among others. During his lifetime, he had five retrospectives, which traveled to museums throughout the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London, are among the over fifty museums in which his works can be found. Having suffered from Alzheimer's disease since 1985, Brooks died in East Hampton, New York, in 1992.
1) James Brooks, as quoted in Lisa Mintz Messinger, "James Brooks: A Quarter-Century of Work" (Huntington, New York: The Heckscher Museum, 1988), 11. This passage is from a letter that Brooks wrote in 1958 to explain why he refused to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Nature in Abstraction" exhibition.
Biography courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries
Born October 18, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Brooks moved around as a child, because his father was a traveling salesman. He lived in Oklahoma City and Shawnee, Oklahoma, and Denver, Colorado, before settling with his family in Dallas, Texas, where he attended high school and began his formal study of art at Southern Methodist University from 1923-1925. After he left college, he continued his artistic training with Martha Simkins, a former student of William Merritt Chase. In 1926, Brooks relocated to New York City, where he enrolled in night classes at The Art Students League, studying with Kimon Nicolaides and Boardman Robinson. He supported himself by working as a commercial letterer. After completing three years of art school, he spent half the year in his job as a letterer in New York and the other six months traveling in the west and southwest, painting pictures in a Social Realist style. At this time, Brooks began to exhibit his prints and paintings in group shows at the Midtown Galleries and at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
From 1936 to 1942, working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in New York, Brooks executed several murals, including the celebrated "Flight," 1942, an episodic history of the effort to fly on the walls of the lobby of the International Marine Terminal Building at La Guardia Airport (now the Delta Air Lines Terminal). During the Second World War, he served in the United States Army as a combat artist in Egypt and in the Near East, creating images of daily army life and of the destruction wrought by the war. After serving abroad from 1942-1945, he was reassigned to the presentation division of the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in Washington, D.C.
After the war, he returned to New York City to resume painting and reconnected with several old friends from his WPA days, including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. He began to see a great deal of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock and went to live in their old studio on Eighth Street after they moved permanently to the Springs, Long Island. Pollock frequently stayed with Brooks on trips to Manhattan, and Brooks spent his summers in Montauk beginning in 1949. At this time, his work became increasingly abstract, revealing the influence of Synthetic Cubism and the imagery of Arshile Gorky.
While painting in Maine in the summer of 1948, Brooks had an artistic breakthrough. He discovered that the glue paste he used to attach his paper to canvas accidentally bled through to the side with his images. He started to exploit this staining technique, moving beyond the more rigid format of his Cubist-inspired compositions. In addition, he relied more heavily on automatism and free brushwork, creating images that showed the influence of Pollock's action painting methods.
Beginning in the 1950s, while continuing to construct multi-layered canvases filled with small, irregular shapes and thin, fluid lines, Brooks transformed the surface of his pictures. He experimented with the thinning and drying of the medium and with applying mixtures of commercial enamels and oils directly from the tube to create a matte surface and to limit the viscosity of the pigment. From the 1960s on, Brooks simplified his compositions, abandoning the densely packed character of his earlier works. Color, however, remained a consistent and essential ingredient in his pictures, and he frequently started with colored grounds rather than plain white canvas. As the art historian Lisa Mintz Messinger observes, "It is interesting to note that Brooks's Long Island home, which he shares with his wife, the artist Charlotte Park, is filled with delightful and unexpected accents of bright color. White walls and white furniture are juxtaposed against painted wooden floors of mustard yellow, green, and blue and painted yellow ceiling beams." (1)
From 1947 to 1975, Brooks taught as a way to supplement his income. His teaching appointments included instructor in drawing at Columbia University, New York (1946-1948); instructor in lettering at the Pratt Institute, New York (1948-1955); visiting critic at Yale University, New Haven (1955-1960) and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1971-1972); and Andrew Carnegie Visiting Professor of Art at Cooper Union, New York (1975). He also was artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1963 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.
In 1949, Brooks had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery in New York. This exhibition was followed by numerous shows in New York at the Stable Gallery, the Kootz Gallery, and the Martha Jackson Gallery among others. During his lifetime, he had five retrospectives, which traveled to museums throughout the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London, are among the over fifty museums in which his works can be found. Having suffered from Alzheimer's disease since 1985, Brooks died in East Hampton, New York, in 1992.
1) James Brooks, as quoted in Lisa Mintz Messinger, "James Brooks: A Quarter-Century of Work" (Huntington, New York: The Heckscher Museum, 1988), 11. This passage is from a letter that Brooks wrote in 1958 to explain why he refused to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art's "Nature in Abstraction" exhibition.
Biography courtesy of Hollis Taggart Galleries
Byron Browne Byron Browne was born on June 26, 1907 in Yonkers, New York, and worked at a lumberyard to pay his tuition at the National Academy of Design, where he enrolled in 1925 and studied there until 1928, where in his last year he won the prestigious Third Hallgarten Prize for a still-life composition.
Before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miró, and other modern masters and began to study Cahiers d'Art, the French magazine devoted to progressive European art. As he experimented with Cubism, Browne's conviction that abstraction represented the future of art grew. His complete break from traditional art is perhaps best expressed when in 1930 he burned several of his realistic works as a gesture against conventional painting. In 1935 he led a march protesting museums that did not collect modern work.
However, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the value of tradition, and especially to the work of Ingres. Browne believed, with his friend Gorky, that “every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing.”
Byron Browne was a central figure in many of the artistic and political groups that flourished during the 1930s. He was an early member of the Artists’ Union, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and participated in the Artists’ Congress until 1940 when political infighting prompted Browne and others to form the break-away Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
The mid 1930s were difficult financially for Browne. His work was exhibited in a number of shows, but sales were few. Relief came when Burgoyne Diller began championing abstraction within the WPA’s mural division. Browne completed abstract works for Studio D at radio station WNYC, the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center, the Chronic Disease Hospital, the Williamsburg Housing Project, and the 1939 World’s Fair.
Browne’s stylistic excursions took many paths during the 1930s. His WNYC mural reflects the hard-edged Neo-plastic ideas of Diller, although a rougher Expressionism better suited his fascination for the primitive, mythical, and organic. A signer, with Harari and others, of the 1937 Art Front letter, which insisted that abstract art forms “are not separated from life,” Browne admitted nature to his art — whether as an abstracted still life, a fully nonobjective canvas built from colors seen in nature, or in portraits and figure drawings executed with immaculate, Ingres-like finesse. He advocated nature as the foundation for all art and had little use for the spiritual and mystical arguments promoted by Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Collection: "When I hear the words non-objective, intra-subjective, avant-garde and such trivialities, I run. There is only visible nature, visible to the eye or, visible by mechanical means, the telescope, microscope, etc.”
Increasingly in the 1940s, Browne adopted an energetic, gestural style. Painterly brushstrokes and roughly textured surfaces amplify the primordial undercurrents posed by his symbolic and mythical themes. In 1945, Browne showed with Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Romare Bearden, and Robert Motherwell at the newly opened Samuel Kootz Gallery. When Kootz suspended business for a year in 1948, Browne began showing at Grand Central Galleries.
In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League, and in 1959 he began teaching advanced painting at New York University.
Byron Browne died in New York in 1961.
Browne's work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions.
Sources: Smithsonian Institution; American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s, The J. Donald Nichols Collection, Margaret Gregory. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York. 1998
Before finishing his studies, Browne discovered the newly established Gallery of Living Art. There and through his friends John Graham and Arshile Gorky, he became fascinated with Picasso, Braque, Miró, and other modern masters and began to study Cahiers d'Art, the French magazine devoted to progressive European art. As he experimented with Cubism, Browne's conviction that abstraction represented the future of art grew. His complete break from traditional art is perhaps best expressed when in 1930 he burned several of his realistic works as a gesture against conventional painting. In 1935 he led a march protesting museums that did not collect modern work.
However, he remained steadfast in his commitment to the value of tradition, and especially to the work of Ingres. Browne believed, with his friend Gorky, that “every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing.”
Byron Browne was a central figure in many of the artistic and political groups that flourished during the 1930s. He was an early member of the Artists’ Union, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and participated in the Artists’ Congress until 1940 when political infighting prompted Browne and others to form the break-away Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
The mid 1930s were difficult financially for Browne. His work was exhibited in a number of shows, but sales were few. Relief came when Burgoyne Diller began championing abstraction within the WPA’s mural division. Browne completed abstract works for Studio D at radio station WNYC, the U.S. Passport Office in Rockefeller Center, the Chronic Disease Hospital, the Williamsburg Housing Project, and the 1939 World’s Fair.
Browne’s stylistic excursions took many paths during the 1930s. His WNYC mural reflects the hard-edged Neo-plastic ideas of Diller, although a rougher Expressionism better suited his fascination for the primitive, mythical, and organic. A signer, with Harari and others, of the 1937 Art Front letter, which insisted that abstract art forms “are not separated from life,” Browne admitted nature to his art — whether as an abstracted still life, a fully nonobjective canvas built from colors seen in nature, or in portraits and figure drawings executed with immaculate, Ingres-like finesse. He advocated nature as the foundation for all art and had little use for the spiritual and mystical arguments promoted by Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Collection: "When I hear the words non-objective, intra-subjective, avant-garde and such trivialities, I run. There is only visible nature, visible to the eye or, visible by mechanical means, the telescope, microscope, etc.”
Increasingly in the 1940s, Browne adopted an energetic, gestural style. Painterly brushstrokes and roughly textured surfaces amplify the primordial undercurrents posed by his symbolic and mythical themes. In 1945, Browne showed with Adolph Gottlieb, William Baziotes, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Romare Bearden, and Robert Motherwell at the newly opened Samuel Kootz Gallery. When Kootz suspended business for a year in 1948, Browne began showing at Grand Central Galleries.
In 1950, he joined the faculty of the Art Students League, and in 1959 he began teaching advanced painting at New York University.
Byron Browne died in New York in 1961.
Browne's work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions.
Sources: Smithsonian Institution; American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s, The J. Donald Nichols Collection, Margaret Gregory. Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York. 1998
Jack Brusca Jack Brusca's ability to interpret the natural wonder of ordinary things and ideas is the major reason he is so highly regarded in today's contemporary art world. As an illusionist who manipulates letters, numbers and flowers among things, Brusca's keen sense of spacial dimension and color blend to give his work a theatrical-type light. As John Canady of The New York Times wrote:"... (Brusca's) geometrical forms are painted with adegree of illusionism that makes a metal band seem to arch away from the wall, turning the painting into sculpture".
Born in New York in 1939, Brusca studied at the University of New Hampshire and The School of Visual Arts, New York. His first one-man show was held at Galeria Bonino in New York in 1969. Since then his works have been displayed throughout the United States and South America. He has participated in numerous exhibitions including Expo '67, Montreal; Paintings and Sculptures Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Highlights of the Season at the Larry Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.
Mr. Brusca won critical praise when he had his first one-man show, in 1969 at the Bonino Galleria on West 57th Street, for painting that came out of Leger and the mechanistic tradition but was not enslaved to those origins.
At a 1973 show in that gallery, he was lauded by one critic as being "just about as sharp as they come" in the illusionistic representation of sleek three-dimensional forms through a mixture of surrealism, pop and hard-edged neo-realism.
His last one-man show, in 1989, was at the Paraty Gallery in SoHo. His paintings were also shown at several museums and acquired by the Whitney Museum and others.
Mr. Brusca also designed sets and costumes for ballet. His costumes for Louis Falco's ballet "Escarpot," performed by Alvin Ailey Dance Theater at City Center in 1991, won critical praise. He also designed jewelry.
Jack Brusca died in 1993.
Born in New York in 1939, Brusca studied at the University of New Hampshire and The School of Visual Arts, New York. His first one-man show was held at Galeria Bonino in New York in 1969. Since then his works have been displayed throughout the United States and South America. He has participated in numerous exhibitions including Expo '67, Montreal; Paintings and Sculptures Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Highlights of the Season at the Larry Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Conn.
Mr. Brusca won critical praise when he had his first one-man show, in 1969 at the Bonino Galleria on West 57th Street, for painting that came out of Leger and the mechanistic tradition but was not enslaved to those origins.
At a 1973 show in that gallery, he was lauded by one critic as being "just about as sharp as they come" in the illusionistic representation of sleek three-dimensional forms through a mixture of surrealism, pop and hard-edged neo-realism.
His last one-man show, in 1989, was at the Paraty Gallery in SoHo. His paintings were also shown at several museums and acquired by the Whitney Museum and others.
Mr. Brusca also designed sets and costumes for ballet. His costumes for Louis Falco's ballet "Escarpot," performed by Alvin Ailey Dance Theater at City Center in 1991, won critical praise. He also designed jewelry.
Jack Brusca died in 1993.
Paul Burlin Paul Burlin was born in New York in 1886. Though he had some training at the National Academy of Design, he later dropped out to pursue his studies informally. He visited the Southwest for the first time in 1910, and paintings from this visit were received warmly in New York and shown in a 1911 exhibition. As a result of his early success, he was one of the youngest artists (at twenty-six years of age) to participate in the 1913 Armory Show – the revolutionary exhibition of avant-garde European work that can be credited with introducing modern art to the United States and stimulating the development of modernism in America. There, Burlin’s work was exhibited alongside works by such artists as Picasso, Monet, Cézanne, and Duchamp.
In 1913 Burlin returned to the Southwest to live, where he drew inspiration from the cultures and landscape. Like many modernists of the day, Burlin was fascinated by so-called "primitive" art, particularly the designs and palette of the Native cultures he encountered in New Mexico. In 1917 he met and married Natalie Curtis, a highly-regarded ethnomusicologist specializing in Native American music. Burlin was the first participant in the Armory show to live in New Mexico, and his time there had a profound impact, not only on his own work, but on the development of modernism throughout the Southwest.
In 1921, Paul and Natalie Burlin moved to Paris as part of an exodus of expatriate artists responding to the provincialism of America after World War I, exemplified by the hostile reaction to his abstract work and other modern art. In Paris, Burlin found himself in the cultural center of modern art. He studied European abstract artists, working with the Cubist Albert Gleizes, and further developed some of the intellectual and symbolic elements that he had begun in the Southwest.
Later that year, Natalie was killed in an automobile accident. Burlin was devastated. He moved back to the Southwest, but found no solace there, and soon returned to Europe. He continued to live in Paris until 1932, when he moved back to the United States in the midst of the Great Depression to work for the WPA.
During this time, Burlin’s work tended toward social-realism, experimenting with political and urban themes. Throughout the war, Burlin employed themes of war and persecution, drawing much of his inspiration from Picasso’s war paintings.
Burlin exhibited throughout his career, and as a member of the American Congress of Artists was active in both the Provincetown Artists Colony and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He was represented by several prestigious New York galleries during his lifetime, including Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery and the Grace Borgenicht Gallery. A prominent retrospective of his work was sponsored by the American Federation of the Arts at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Whitney Museum in 1962.
The 2023 Peyton Wright Gallery exhibition “Transformation of Spirit to Pigment: Harmony in Chaos” celebrated Paul Burlin’s mature works, ca. 1950 –1969; not only his most prolific and productive period but arguably his most poetic, with numerous canvases from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions. The accompanying catalogue at the link below is the most extensive biographic chronology of the artist to date including his exhibition history, literature and publications.
Burlin's work can be found in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Albuquerque Museum, NM; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; , the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel, among others.
View 2023 catalogue exhibition price list
Paul Burlin Essay by Irving Sandler
In 1913 Burlin returned to the Southwest to live, where he drew inspiration from the cultures and landscape. Like many modernists of the day, Burlin was fascinated by so-called "primitive" art, particularly the designs and palette of the Native cultures he encountered in New Mexico. In 1917 he met and married Natalie Curtis, a highly-regarded ethnomusicologist specializing in Native American music. Burlin was the first participant in the Armory show to live in New Mexico, and his time there had a profound impact, not only on his own work, but on the development of modernism throughout the Southwest.
In 1921, Paul and Natalie Burlin moved to Paris as part of an exodus of expatriate artists responding to the provincialism of America after World War I, exemplified by the hostile reaction to his abstract work and other modern art. In Paris, Burlin found himself in the cultural center of modern art. He studied European abstract artists, working with the Cubist Albert Gleizes, and further developed some of the intellectual and symbolic elements that he had begun in the Southwest.
Later that year, Natalie was killed in an automobile accident. Burlin was devastated. He moved back to the Southwest, but found no solace there, and soon returned to Europe. He continued to live in Paris until 1932, when he moved back to the United States in the midst of the Great Depression to work for the WPA.
During this time, Burlin’s work tended toward social-realism, experimenting with political and urban themes. Throughout the war, Burlin employed themes of war and persecution, drawing much of his inspiration from Picasso’s war paintings.
Burlin exhibited throughout his career, and as a member of the American Congress of Artists was active in both the Provincetown Artists Colony and the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He was represented by several prestigious New York galleries during his lifetime, including Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery and the Grace Borgenicht Gallery. A prominent retrospective of his work was sponsored by the American Federation of the Arts at the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the Whitney Museum in 1962.
The 2023 Peyton Wright Gallery exhibition “Transformation of Spirit to Pigment: Harmony in Chaos” celebrated Paul Burlin’s mature works, ca. 1950 –1969; not only his most prolific and productive period but arguably his most poetic, with numerous canvases from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art exhibitions. The accompanying catalogue at the link below is the most extensive biographic chronology of the artist to date including his exhibition history, literature and publications.
Burlin's work can be found in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Albuquerque Museum, NM; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; , the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv, Israel, among others.
View 2023 catalogue exhibition price list
Paul Burlin Essay by Irving Sandler
Flavio E. Cabral Flavio Emanuel Cabral (1918–1990) was an influential American painter, muralist, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. He is most celebrated for pioneering a unique artistic style known as "Spherism," which reinterpreted the geometric fragmentation of Cubism into smooth, rounded, and cylindrical forms.
Cabral was born in Born in New York City to Portuguese parents from Trinidad. His earliest art techniques were mastered as a young boy, when he would spend hours copying pictures of movie stars from fan magazines.
His family relocated to Los Angeles in 1936, where he settled for the remainder of his life. Most of Cabral’s formal training occurred at the Von Schneidau School of Art, through his work and affiliation with the Federal Art Project under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Federal Art Project supported future iconic artists like Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Grant Wood, as well as the great Mexican muralist/painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, who became his mentor and who shared with Cabral a mutual Portuguese heritage. As a young teenager in 1930, Cabral attended the “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” exhibition at the Delphic Studios, New York City, where he first encountered Siqueiros’ work and became an admirer.
The Federal Art Project in which Cabral participated supported future iconic artists like Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Grant Wood, as well as the great Mexican muralist/painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, who became his mentor and who shared with Cabral a mutual Portuguese heritag. As a young teenager in 1930, Cabral attended the “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” exhibition at the Delphic Studios, New York City, where he first encountered Siqueiros’ work and became an admirer.
By 1940, Cabral was firmly entrenched in the Los Angeles art scene. He was earning a living painting portraits and murals, working as an illustrator, executing art for building lobbies and store windows on Sunset, Hollywood, and Wilshire Boulevards.
For several years, Cabral, then fondly identified locally as “the Latin from Manhattan,” was exclusively responsible for all displays at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, as well as for the Egyptian and Hawaiian Theatres. It was during this period that the artist met his future wife, Louise Cohen, who was studying to be a concert pianist.
In 1946, at the invitation of Siqueiros. the Cabrals embarked on a 1500 mile automobile trip from Los Angeles to Mexico City.
In Siqueiros’ own words: “... (When) Flavio Cabral, thirty year old North American painter of Portuguese origin, showed me his works, I saw in them a subtle perception of poetic, subjective elements that constitute the primordial elements in the best painting of all time. Such an observation impelled me to approach Carlos Pellicer,” the master muralist continued, “to give him the opportunity of exhibiting Cabral's works in the Palace of Fine Arts.” Pellicer, an influential Mexican poet and contemporary of Octavio Paz, was heavily active in the promotion of Mexican art, and helped to establish a number of museums in Mexico City.
Thanks to Siqueiros’s unflagging support as well as to Pellicer’s enthusiastic response to his talent, Cabral apprenticed and received a fellowship to study in Mexico City at the esteemed Academy of San Carlos. While in Mexico, he was honored with several one man shows, including the aforementioned exclusive engagement at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, the most important cultural center in the country, arranged by Siqueiros.
Cabral completed undergraduate and graduate studies at California State University, where he earned a B.A. in arts education (1955) and a Master of Arts in Painting (1956) from California State University, Los Angeles. He spent over 30 years as a dedicated professor of painting and art history at Los Angeles Valley College. and painted until the day he died of a massive heart attack on March 22, 1990.
Following his death, his widow Louise helped establish and fund the Agoura Hills Center for the Arts, inspired by his creative legacy.
Throughout his career, his works were exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco, CA; Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Laguna Beach Art Association, Laguna Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hollywood Art Center, Hollywood, CA; Chaffey Community Art Association, Ontario, CA; Glendale Art Association, Glendale, CA; The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA; Dalzell Hatfield Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Collectors Gallery, Chicago, IL; Gallery D, Enchante, New York, NY; The Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; anf the Civic Arts Cultural Center, Thousand Oaks, CA, among others.
Cabral's works are held in such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Hilbert Museum of California Art, Chapman University, Orange, CA; California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA; The Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, CA; Robert Fulton College Preparatory, Los Angeles, CA; and the Agoura Hills Center for the Arts, Agoura Hills, CA.
Biographical sources include the Artist's Estate; Papillon Gallery, Los Angeles; others
Cabral was born in Born in New York City to Portuguese parents from Trinidad. His earliest art techniques were mastered as a young boy, when he would spend hours copying pictures of movie stars from fan magazines.
His family relocated to Los Angeles in 1936, where he settled for the remainder of his life. Most of Cabral’s formal training occurred at the Von Schneidau School of Art, through his work and affiliation with the Federal Art Project under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Federal Art Project supported future iconic artists like Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Grant Wood, as well as the great Mexican muralist/painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, who became his mentor and who shared with Cabral a mutual Portuguese heritage. As a young teenager in 1930, Cabral attended the “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” exhibition at the Delphic Studios, New York City, where he first encountered Siqueiros’ work and became an admirer.
The Federal Art Project in which Cabral participated supported future iconic artists like Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Louise Nevelson, and Grant Wood, as well as the great Mexican muralist/painters Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, who became his mentor and who shared with Cabral a mutual Portuguese heritag. As a young teenager in 1930, Cabral attended the “Mexican Artists and Artists of the Mexican School” exhibition at the Delphic Studios, New York City, where he first encountered Siqueiros’ work and became an admirer.
By 1940, Cabral was firmly entrenched in the Los Angeles art scene. He was earning a living painting portraits and murals, working as an illustrator, executing art for building lobbies and store windows on Sunset, Hollywood, and Wilshire Boulevards.
For several years, Cabral, then fondly identified locally as “the Latin from Manhattan,” was exclusively responsible for all displays at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, as well as for the Egyptian and Hawaiian Theatres. It was during this period that the artist met his future wife, Louise Cohen, who was studying to be a concert pianist.
In 1946, at the invitation of Siqueiros. the Cabrals embarked on a 1500 mile automobile trip from Los Angeles to Mexico City.
In Siqueiros’ own words: “... (When) Flavio Cabral, thirty year old North American painter of Portuguese origin, showed me his works, I saw in them a subtle perception of poetic, subjective elements that constitute the primordial elements in the best painting of all time. Such an observation impelled me to approach Carlos Pellicer,” the master muralist continued, “to give him the opportunity of exhibiting Cabral's works in the Palace of Fine Arts.” Pellicer, an influential Mexican poet and contemporary of Octavio Paz, was heavily active in the promotion of Mexican art, and helped to establish a number of museums in Mexico City.
Thanks to Siqueiros’s unflagging support as well as to Pellicer’s enthusiastic response to his talent, Cabral apprenticed and received a fellowship to study in Mexico City at the esteemed Academy of San Carlos. While in Mexico, he was honored with several one man shows, including the aforementioned exclusive engagement at Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, the most important cultural center in the country, arranged by Siqueiros.
Cabral completed undergraduate and graduate studies at California State University, where he earned a B.A. in arts education (1955) and a Master of Arts in Painting (1956) from California State University, Los Angeles. He spent over 30 years as a dedicated professor of painting and art history at Los Angeles Valley College. and painted until the day he died of a massive heart attack on March 22, 1990.
Following his death, his widow Louise helped establish and fund the Agoura Hills Center for the Arts, inspired by his creative legacy.
Throughout his career, his works were exhibited at the San Francisco Art Association, San Francisco, CA; Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Laguna Beach Art Association, Laguna Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Hollywood Art Center, Hollywood, CA; Chaffey Community Art Association, Ontario, CA; Glendale Art Association, Glendale, CA; The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA; Dalzell Hatfield Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Collectors Gallery, Chicago, IL; Gallery D, Enchante, New York, NY; The Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; anf the Civic Arts Cultural Center, Thousand Oaks, CA, among others.
Cabral's works are held in such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The Hilbert Museum of California Art, Chapman University, Orange, CA; California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA; The Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, CA; Robert Fulton College Preparatory, Los Angeles, CA; and the Agoura Hills Center for the Arts, Agoura Hills, CA.
Biographical sources include the Artist's Estate; Papillon Gallery, Los Angeles; others
Lawrence Calcagno San Francisco-born artist Lawrence Calcagno spent the first part of his life on a ranch near Big Sur, California, teaching himself to paint from his own observations of the California landscape. His parents, Vincent and Anna de Rosa Calcagno were Italian immigrants. Calcagno remained largely self-taught until after World War II, when he began to study painting under the G.I. Bill with the artist Clyfford Still, whose saturated palette and thick-textured linear style remained influences on Calcagno’s work throughout his career.
Calcagno went on to study at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco from 1947-1950, as well as at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1950-1951 and the Instituto d’Arte Statale in Florence from 1951-1952. Calcagno’s work was first shown at the Faccheti Gallery in Paris in 1952. He continued to work and study in Paris until 1955. During this time, Calcagno became acquainted with Martha Jackson, who mounted his first one-man at her New York gallery in 1955.
While in Paris, Calcagno met the artist Beauford Delaney. An unlikely pair, the two became companions and remained close over the next twenty years.
Delaney and Calcagno had many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings, than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work, and both were also aware of their social isolation that accompanied their homosexuality. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind" with their recognizable and consistent horizons derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature. Through Delaney, Calcagno also became friends with James Baldwin and the three travelled together.
The relationship between Delaney and Calcagno can be summarized in a single phrase that Delaney wrote in a letter to Calcagno in 1968, in which he described a “deathless kinship that is constant [and] is always alive and close between us.”
Calcagno was friends with the artist Jack Whitten. In 1964 Calcagno supported Whitten alongside artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Wayne Thiebaud to secure Whitten a grant for minority artists from the John Hay Whitney Foundation.
Over the next several years, Calcagno served as artist-in-residence at the University of Alabama, the Albright School of the University of Buffalo, the University of Illinois, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
From 1959-1960, Calcagno taught at New York University and showed his work at exhibitions in places as diverse as Lima, Peru, Mexico City, London, and Copenhagen. In 1965, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant. He was also named the visiting Andrew Mellon Chair of Painting at Carnegie-Mellon University, and was also awarded fellowships by the Yaddo Foundation of Saratoga Springs, New York, the MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire, and he eventually purchased a home in Taos, New Mexico after his 1972 Wurlitzer residency there.
Calcagno’s work is strongly reminiscent of the California landscapes of his early life, employing a warm, saturated palette and unfocused, minimal, mostly linear forms, evoking oceanscapes and sunsets.
His pieces were shown in a circulating exhibition by the Smithsonian from 1973-1975, in a touring retrospective by the Mitchell Museum in Mount Vernon, Illinois in 1982, and at solo exhibitions at the Harwood Foundation Museum of Taos and the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York in 1987. In 1989, he was awarded a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Calcagno’s work is included in the public collections of several museums, including Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.
Calcagno went on to study at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco from 1947-1950, as well as at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1950-1951 and the Instituto d’Arte Statale in Florence from 1951-1952. Calcagno’s work was first shown at the Faccheti Gallery in Paris in 1952. He continued to work and study in Paris until 1955. During this time, Calcagno became acquainted with Martha Jackson, who mounted his first one-man at her New York gallery in 1955.
While in Paris, Calcagno met the artist Beauford Delaney. An unlikely pair, the two became companions and remained close over the next twenty years.
Delaney and Calcagno had many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings, than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work, and both were also aware of their social isolation that accompanied their homosexuality. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind" with their recognizable and consistent horizons derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature. Through Delaney, Calcagno also became friends with James Baldwin and the three travelled together.
The relationship between Delaney and Calcagno can be summarized in a single phrase that Delaney wrote in a letter to Calcagno in 1968, in which he described a “deathless kinship that is constant [and] is always alive and close between us.”
Calcagno was friends with the artist Jack Whitten. In 1964 Calcagno supported Whitten alongside artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Wayne Thiebaud to secure Whitten a grant for minority artists from the John Hay Whitney Foundation.
Over the next several years, Calcagno served as artist-in-residence at the University of Alabama, the Albright School of the University of Buffalo, the University of Illinois, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
From 1959-1960, Calcagno taught at New York University and showed his work at exhibitions in places as diverse as Lima, Peru, Mexico City, London, and Copenhagen. In 1965, he was awarded a Ford Foundation grant. He was also named the visiting Andrew Mellon Chair of Painting at Carnegie-Mellon University, and was also awarded fellowships by the Yaddo Foundation of Saratoga Springs, New York, the MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire, and he eventually purchased a home in Taos, New Mexico after his 1972 Wurlitzer residency there.
Calcagno’s work is strongly reminiscent of the California landscapes of his early life, employing a warm, saturated palette and unfocused, minimal, mostly linear forms, evoking oceanscapes and sunsets.
His pieces were shown in a circulating exhibition by the Smithsonian from 1973-1975, in a touring retrospective by the Mitchell Museum in Mount Vernon, Illinois in 1982, and at solo exhibitions at the Harwood Foundation Museum of Taos and the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York in 1987. In 1989, he was awarded a major grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Calcagno’s work is included in the public collections of several museums, including Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others.
Marie Romero Cash Marie Romero Cash is a well-known award -winning folk artist and writer in Santa Fe, where she has lived most of her life. Her whimsical one-of-a-kind creations are in demand by collectors of all ages.
Primarily recognized for creating traditional New Mexican art for fifty years, in 2024 Cash presented for the first time to the public a series of acrylic paintings begun over a decade ago when a sibling was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
She is one of only five United States artists invited to participate in the 2019 International Folk Art Market and has participated in the annual Spanish Market in Santa Fe for over forty- five years.
The daughter of prominent traditional tinwork artists, the late Senaida and Emilio Romero, Marie has created large altar screens for a number of churches in the United States and in Mexico, including Stations of the Cross for the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, which have been viewed by tens of thousands of visitors.
As a writer, her early works focused on research-based books about the culture and churches of Northern New Mexico, along with a memoir about growing up in Santa Fe in the 1950s.
Later she authored a mystery series based around Santa Fe; a romantic novel about the Pueblo Revolt; a children’s book; and most recently, a second memoir, “Staying Afloat.”
Her works are in the following collections: the Museum of International Folk Art; the Gene Autry Museum of the American West; the Albuquerque Museum; the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art; the Smithsonian Institute; the Vatican; the Archdiocese of Santa Fe; the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; and many private collections.
Primarily recognized for creating traditional New Mexican art for fifty years, in 2024 Cash presented for the first time to the public a series of acrylic paintings begun over a decade ago when a sibling was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
She is one of only five United States artists invited to participate in the 2019 International Folk Art Market and has participated in the annual Spanish Market in Santa Fe for over forty- five years.
The daughter of prominent traditional tinwork artists, the late Senaida and Emilio Romero, Marie has created large altar screens for a number of churches in the United States and in Mexico, including Stations of the Cross for the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, which have been viewed by tens of thousands of visitors.
As a writer, her early works focused on research-based books about the culture and churches of Northern New Mexico, along with a memoir about growing up in Santa Fe in the 1950s.
Later she authored a mystery series based around Santa Fe; a romantic novel about the Pueblo Revolt; a children’s book; and most recently, a second memoir, “Staying Afloat.”
Her works are in the following collections: the Museum of International Folk Art; the Gene Autry Museum of the American West; the Albuquerque Museum; the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art; the Smithsonian Institute; the Vatican; the Archdiocese of Santa Fe; the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; and many private collections.
Louis Catusco A painter, an enigma, and a beloved member of the Taos Moderns, Louis Catusco (1927-1995) was free and sophisticated in his use of the decisive played against the happy accident. He continued to evolve with each successive canvas, provoking the eye and stimulating the intellect.
A Navy veteran from World War II, Louis Catusco used his GI Bill benefits to study art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the 1940’s. Of all the mystics, poets, eccentrics and visionaries among the Taos Moderns, Louis is the most enigmatic. In 1950 he came to Taos to work with Louis Ribak at the Taos Valley Art School, settling here permanently in 1963. After winning many awards, both local and state, Louis dropped out of the Taos art scene to continue his work in solitude.
Catusco placed a high value on experimentation and his paintings are an expression of his feelings on the act of artistic creation. His art operates on a deep level from a personal, primary spirituality. His late collages are dynamic expressions of inspired obsession emanating from sources, both primal & mysterious. They elude simple classification, giving Catusco’s legacy an air of mystery.
In his last years, Catusco became even more removed from society, limiting his contact with the public to occasional letters to the editor of The Taos News. A pack of unusually vicious dogs further insured his privacy.
Like many struggling artists he both hid from attention, (once leading Taos art journalist Tricia Hurst on a mad chase through the Safeway grocery store trying to avoid an interview), while, at the same time, complaining about the lack of rewards given to his artistic pursuits.
His works are in several collections, including the Omaha National Bank, Omaha, NE; the Midland Federal Savings, Denver, CO; the Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; as well as numerous private collections.
His works have also been exhibited at the Stables Gallery, Taos NM; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; El Paso Museum of Fine Art, El Paso, TX; Dallas Museum, Dallas, TX ; Joslyn Art Museum, Joslyn, MO; and the Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK .
Biographical sources: Taos News; David Witt, “Modernist in Taos”
A Navy veteran from World War II, Louis Catusco used his GI Bill benefits to study art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the 1940’s. Of all the mystics, poets, eccentrics and visionaries among the Taos Moderns, Louis is the most enigmatic. In 1950 he came to Taos to work with Louis Ribak at the Taos Valley Art School, settling here permanently in 1963. After winning many awards, both local and state, Louis dropped out of the Taos art scene to continue his work in solitude.
Catusco placed a high value on experimentation and his paintings are an expression of his feelings on the act of artistic creation. His art operates on a deep level from a personal, primary spirituality. His late collages are dynamic expressions of inspired obsession emanating from sources, both primal & mysterious. They elude simple classification, giving Catusco’s legacy an air of mystery.
In his last years, Catusco became even more removed from society, limiting his contact with the public to occasional letters to the editor of The Taos News. A pack of unusually vicious dogs further insured his privacy.
Like many struggling artists he both hid from attention, (once leading Taos art journalist Tricia Hurst on a mad chase through the Safeway grocery store trying to avoid an interview), while, at the same time, complaining about the lack of rewards given to his artistic pursuits.
His works are in several collections, including the Omaha National Bank, Omaha, NE; the Midland Federal Savings, Denver, CO; the Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; as well as numerous private collections.
His works have also been exhibited at the Stables Gallery, Taos NM; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; El Paso Museum of Fine Art, El Paso, TX; Dallas Museum, Dallas, TX ; Joslyn Art Museum, Joslyn, MO; and the Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK .
Biographical sources: Taos News; David Witt, “Modernist in Taos”
Carlo Ciussi Carlo Ciussi (1930-2012) was one of the leading figures of Italian abstract art in the second half of the twentieth-century.
After an apprenticeship with painter Fred Pittino, Ciussi attended art school in Venice from 1945 to 1949. Here he met the art critic and historian Giuseppe Marchiori and the leading Venetian painters of the time, Emilio Vedova and Giuseppe Santomaso. He also had the opportunity to visit the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948, where he saw the works of Pablo Picasso and Gino Rossi.
Returning to Udine in 1949 to work with his father, he continued painting, creating works influenced by Expressionist and Neo-Cubist art.
In 1955 he exhibited at the 7th Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome, and in 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the 32nd Biennale d’Arte di Venezia. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to join the stable at the newly opened Stendhal Gallery in Milan, which allowed him to take a studio in that city and to finally paint full time. During this period, Ciussi also began his shift from figurative work to abstraction.
He exhibited again for the Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome in 1965. In 1967 he took part in the 9th São Paulo Biennale in Brazil and also held his first solo exhibition abroad, at the Galerie Paul Facchetti in Paris.
The first retrospective devoted to him was held in 1974 at the Palazzo Torriani in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near his home town of Udine, followed in 1977 by one at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Ferrara. In 1980 he had solo shows at the Lorenzelli Arte gallery in Milan and at Studio la Cittа in Verona. In 1986 he exhibited at the 42nd Biennale d’Arte di Venezia.
In 1997, the Civico Museo Revoltella in Trieste held a retrospective exhibition of his paintings and sculpture and in 1998 a large solo exhibition was put on at the Esslinger Kunstverein in the Villa Merkel in Esslingen.
In the early 2000s, Ciussi took part in many exhibitions in Italy, and retrospectives were put on at the Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg and at the Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt. In 2011, the Civici Musei di Udine presented Carlo Ciussi 1964-2011.
In 2016, a solo room of his work was included in the Postwar Era: A Recent History exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Ciussi died in Udine in April 2012.
sources: Comune de Pordenone; Susanna J. Fichera Fine Art; photo, public domain
After an apprenticeship with painter Fred Pittino, Ciussi attended art school in Venice from 1945 to 1949. Here he met the art critic and historian Giuseppe Marchiori and the leading Venetian painters of the time, Emilio Vedova and Giuseppe Santomaso. He also had the opportunity to visit the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948, where he saw the works of Pablo Picasso and Gino Rossi.
Returning to Udine in 1949 to work with his father, he continued painting, creating works influenced by Expressionist and Neo-Cubist art.
In 1955 he exhibited at the 7th Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome, and in 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the 32nd Biennale d’Arte di Venezia. Shortly thereafter, he was invited to join the stable at the newly opened Stendhal Gallery in Milan, which allowed him to take a studio in that city and to finally paint full time. During this period, Ciussi also began his shift from figurative work to abstraction.
He exhibited again for the Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte in Rome in 1965. In 1967 he took part in the 9th São Paulo Biennale in Brazil and also held his first solo exhibition abroad, at the Galerie Paul Facchetti in Paris.
The first retrospective devoted to him was held in 1974 at the Palazzo Torriani in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near his home town of Udine, followed in 1977 by one at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Ferrara. In 1980 he had solo shows at the Lorenzelli Arte gallery in Milan and at Studio la Cittа in Verona. In 1986 he exhibited at the 42nd Biennale d’Arte di Venezia.
In 1997, the Civico Museo Revoltella in Trieste held a retrospective exhibition of his paintings and sculpture and in 1998 a large solo exhibition was put on at the Esslinger Kunstverein in the Villa Merkel in Esslingen.
In the early 2000s, Ciussi took part in many exhibitions in Italy, and retrospectives were put on at the Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg and at the Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt. In 2011, the Civici Musei di Udine presented Carlo Ciussi 1964-2011.
In 2016, a solo room of his work was included in the Postwar Era: A Recent History exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Ciussi died in Udine in April 2012.
sources: Comune de Pordenone; Susanna J. Fichera Fine Art; photo, public domain
Geneviève Claisse “My vocabulary is open to the research of movement – and of multiple spaces – which animates the plan of the painted surface. The circle and the triangle, addressed one after the other and separately, are my favorite topics of serial compositions, where the extreme simplicity of the shapes is transfigured by the intensity - each time different of the color relationships.” - Geneviève Claisse
Geneviève Claisse, who specialized in geometric abstraction, was born in 1935, in Quievy, France. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, during which time her approach to painting was also influenced by reading Art d’Aujourd’hui (Art of Today), a publication created to defend and promote geometric abstraction and the synthesis of the arts, published between June 1949 and December 1954.
Claisse was the great niece of artist Auguste Herbin, a founder of the French group of artists known as Abstraction-Création. Herbin saw Claisse's work for the first time when she was eighteen years old, and encouraged her to continue painting. In Herbin's mind, Claisse was "le successeur désigné par le destin et par l'hérédité" ("the successor appointed by destiny and heredity"). In the late 1950s, Genevieve worked as an assistant in Herbin's studio. At this young age she worked tirelessly, often working at night after a day in the studio, carefully painting abstract forms on bold, colorful canvases.
Like Herbin, Claisse shows a devotion to the ideals of formal purity and the perfection of execution.
Claisse’s work is a rigorous exploration of geometric abstraction, which began in 1958 and went through various creative phases. Her early works were lyrical abstractions treated in vivid patches of solid color. She later expanded her vocabulary in her search for movement and multiple spaces that would animate the flatness of the painted surface. Circles and triangles, which the artist treats in turns and independently, are the two recurring themes in her serial compositions, in which the extreme simplicity of the shapes is transfigured by the variations in color ratios.
Claisse’s two-dimensional kinetic approach reached a new peak in the mid-1970s when she temporarily gave up shapes and colors in favor of the geometric play of black lines on a white background. Enhanced by what she learned, her work reverted to a comparative treatment of color, which the artist chose to use with the strictest economy of means. Claisse reduced her compositions to precisely executed and sensitively balanced compositions, alternating solid color blocks and lines. During this transitional period, the white background became a permanent feature in her work.
Claisse’s works have been exhibited in the Galerie Caille, Cambrai; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Lille; La Chaux-de-Fonds (Biennale de Paris, 1967); Galeried;Eendt, Amsterdam; and Galerie Hyber and Galerie Denise René, Paris.
Her works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirschhorn Foundation, Washington, D.C.; Musée Matisse du Cateau-Cambrésis ; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Musées des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux de Fonds; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Collection UNESCO, Paris; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch/Stuttgart; FRAC-Ile de France; and the LaM, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, among others.
Geneviève Claisse, who specialized in geometric abstraction, was born in 1935, in Quievy, France. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, during which time her approach to painting was also influenced by reading Art d’Aujourd’hui (Art of Today), a publication created to defend and promote geometric abstraction and the synthesis of the arts, published between June 1949 and December 1954.
Claisse was the great niece of artist Auguste Herbin, a founder of the French group of artists known as Abstraction-Création. Herbin saw Claisse's work for the first time when she was eighteen years old, and encouraged her to continue painting. In Herbin's mind, Claisse was "le successeur désigné par le destin et par l'hérédité" ("the successor appointed by destiny and heredity"). In the late 1950s, Genevieve worked as an assistant in Herbin's studio. At this young age she worked tirelessly, often working at night after a day in the studio, carefully painting abstract forms on bold, colorful canvases.
Like Herbin, Claisse shows a devotion to the ideals of formal purity and the perfection of execution.
Claisse’s work is a rigorous exploration of geometric abstraction, which began in 1958 and went through various creative phases. Her early works were lyrical abstractions treated in vivid patches of solid color. She later expanded her vocabulary in her search for movement and multiple spaces that would animate the flatness of the painted surface. Circles and triangles, which the artist treats in turns and independently, are the two recurring themes in her serial compositions, in which the extreme simplicity of the shapes is transfigured by the variations in color ratios.
Claisse’s two-dimensional kinetic approach reached a new peak in the mid-1970s when she temporarily gave up shapes and colors in favor of the geometric play of black lines on a white background. Enhanced by what she learned, her work reverted to a comparative treatment of color, which the artist chose to use with the strictest economy of means. Claisse reduced her compositions to precisely executed and sensitively balanced compositions, alternating solid color blocks and lines. During this transitional period, the white background became a permanent feature in her work.
Claisse’s works have been exhibited in the Galerie Caille, Cambrai; Palais de Beaux-Arts, Lille; La Chaux-de-Fonds (Biennale de Paris, 1967); Galeried;Eendt, Amsterdam; and Galerie Hyber and Galerie Denise René, Paris.
Her works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirschhorn Foundation, Washington, D.C.; Musée Matisse du Cateau-Cambrésis ; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Musées des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux de Fonds; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Collection UNESCO, Paris; Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch/Stuttgart; FRAC-Ile de France; and the LaM, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France, among others.
Henri Clément-Serveau Henri Clément Serveau, also known as Clément-Serveau (29 June 1886 – 8 July 1972), was a French painter, designer, engraver and illustrator.
Clément-Serveau produced works in a realist manner early on, but soon became interested in the new movements. He was influenced by his friend Louis Marcoussis and experimented with Cubism, utilising geometric patterns to give the illusion of form and space. Later in his career, he turned toward abstraction with a post-cubist stance. He designed banknotes for the Banque de France, produced large murals and participated in numerous French and international exhibitions.
Clément-Serveau studied successively from 1904 to 1914 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Luc-Olivier Merson, in Paris. He began exhibiting at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants and then participated at the Salons des Artistes Français, Salon d'Automne, and Salon des Tuileries.
From 1907 to 1909, he was a soldier in the 15th Battalion in the Vosges at Remiremont. In 1913, while still at Remiremont, the 21-year-old married Yvette Hindermeyer (then 17 years of age). There, he would realize many paintings, landscapes and portraits.
In 1919, he became art director of Ferenczi & fils (Le Livre moderne illustré publisher), where he illustrated 78 books using the technique of woodcut. He also participated in 30 other books and received various medals at the Salon des Artistes Français for his work: medal of honor in 1920, bronze in 1921, silver in 1926 and gold in 1929.
In Paris in September 1933, he married Sara Sophie Wisoume (born in Smolensk, 1903).
Thanks to his mentor, Luc-Olivier Merson, he was able to design banknotes for the Banque de France throughout the 1940s. From 1956 to 1970, he designed forty-two French and foreign postage stamps.
After a trip to Greece in 1934, Clement Serveau devoted himself to post-cubism, participating in numerous exhibitions, including the Salon des artistes français. He became Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1936.
He also produced several murals and frescos including a three-by-six-meter painting for the lycée de Meaux, where he was once a student. He directed the l'École de Fresques of l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and decorated the Pavillon du Tourisme at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris), now at the Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, Musées d'Art Moderne, Paris. In 1954 he realized a fresco for the Cité Ouvrière du Laboratoire Débat, Garches. He also executed mural decorations for the Plan des Anciennes Enceintes de Paris in the Musée Carnavalet.
He participated in numerous exhibitions in France, Sweden, London, the United States, and Canada.
Clément-Serveau died in Paris on 8 July 1972. He was buried in Bourbonne-les-Bains, a small town in north-eastern France, where he owned a house on Rue Vellonne. A room in the local museum (Musée Municipal de Bourbonne-les-Bains) is dedicated to him.
His work is well represented in various museums in Paris, Rouen, Lille, Le Havre, Luxembourg, and in museums in the United States, Canada and Greece.
Clément-Serveau produced works in a realist manner early on, but soon became interested in the new movements. He was influenced by his friend Louis Marcoussis and experimented with Cubism, utilising geometric patterns to give the illusion of form and space. Later in his career, he turned toward abstraction with a post-cubist stance. He designed banknotes for the Banque de France, produced large murals and participated in numerous French and international exhibitions.
Clément-Serveau studied successively from 1904 to 1914 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts under Luc-Olivier Merson, in Paris. He began exhibiting at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants and then participated at the Salons des Artistes Français, Salon d'Automne, and Salon des Tuileries.
From 1907 to 1909, he was a soldier in the 15th Battalion in the Vosges at Remiremont. In 1913, while still at Remiremont, the 21-year-old married Yvette Hindermeyer (then 17 years of age). There, he would realize many paintings, landscapes and portraits.
In 1919, he became art director of Ferenczi & fils (Le Livre moderne illustré publisher), where he illustrated 78 books using the technique of woodcut. He also participated in 30 other books and received various medals at the Salon des Artistes Français for his work: medal of honor in 1920, bronze in 1921, silver in 1926 and gold in 1929.
In Paris in September 1933, he married Sara Sophie Wisoume (born in Smolensk, 1903).
Thanks to his mentor, Luc-Olivier Merson, he was able to design banknotes for the Banque de France throughout the 1940s. From 1956 to 1970, he designed forty-two French and foreign postage stamps.
After a trip to Greece in 1934, Clement Serveau devoted himself to post-cubism, participating in numerous exhibitions, including the Salon des artistes français. He became Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1936.
He also produced several murals and frescos including a three-by-six-meter painting for the lycée de Meaux, where he was once a student. He directed the l'École de Fresques of l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and decorated the Pavillon du Tourisme at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris), now at the Pavillon de la Ville de Paris, Musées d'Art Moderne, Paris. In 1954 he realized a fresco for the Cité Ouvrière du Laboratoire Débat, Garches. He also executed mural decorations for the Plan des Anciennes Enceintes de Paris in the Musée Carnavalet.
He participated in numerous exhibitions in France, Sweden, London, the United States, and Canada.
Clément-Serveau died in Paris on 8 July 1972. He was buried in Bourbonne-les-Bains, a small town in north-eastern France, where he owned a house on Rue Vellonne. A room in the local museum (Musée Municipal de Bourbonne-les-Bains) is dedicated to him.
His work is well represented in various museums in Paris, Rouen, Lille, Le Havre, Luxembourg, and in museums in the United States, Canada and Greece.
Gerald Coarding
Dan Cohen Bio pending
Xavier Corbero Xavier Corberó i Olivella (13 June 1935 – 24 April 2017) was a prominent Catalan artist, best known for monumental public sculptures and his extensive house complex in Esplugues de Llobregat near Barcelona. He is widely considered the most important Catalan artist since Gaudí and one of Spain’s most celebrated sculptors.
Corberó's patrilineal family has its roots in Lleida, where the family held a tradition of metalworking, especially in bronze. Corberó's grandfather Pere Corberó i Casals (1875-1959) was an entrepreneur and artist whose works included the bronze memorial on the birthplace of Enrique Granados in Lleida. The Corberó foundry produced sculptures by prominent Catalan sculptors of the time such as Pablo Gargallo, Josep Viladomat and Frederic Marès. It was also an industrial and commercial business that sold bronze doors, chandeliers, fountains, and other decorative items, with a showroom in downtown Barcelona at Rambla de Catalunya 105, and a workshop nearby at Carrer Aribau 103.
Corberó's father, Xavier Corberó i Trepat (1901-1981), also worked in the family bronze workshop. During the Spanish Civil War, Corberó i Trepat fought in the Spanish Republican Armed Forces and was separated from his family. Corberó's mother Montserrat, born Olivella i Vidal, passed away in 1936 while giving birth to his younger brother, who in turn died from smallpox a few years later.
Corberó lived his childhood through the turmoil and scarcity of the civil war and early years of Francoist Spain. In 1950 he enrolled at Escola Massana, and in 1953 volunteered for military service in the Spanish Air Force. In 1955 he lived briefly in Paris and Stockholm, then in London where he was the first-ever Spanish student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He then went on to work for a while at the Medici Foundry in Lausanne.
In Barcelona in the early 1960s he befriended Ricardo Bofill, Antonio Gades, Luis Marsans, and Manuel Viola. In 1962 he moved to New York City at Viola's suggestion, where he spent time with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray before moving back to Barcelona in the mid-1960s. In the ensuing years he immersed himself further in the artistic community of Barcelona and Cadaqués, developing a close friendship with Salvador Dalí (whom he described as his "first patron”) as well as with Jorge Castillo, Robert Llimós , Joan Miró, Elsa Peretti and Josep Lluís Sert, among others.
Corberó had his first metal sculptures exhibited in 1955 at the third Hispano-American Biennial Exhibition. He participated in successive sessions of the avant-garde Saló de maig exhibition in Barcelona and won awards there in 1960 and 1961. He had his first solo exhibition in Munich in 1963, for which he received a Gold Medal from the State of Bavaria. Later solo exhibitions included shows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1964), Staempfli Gallery in New York (1966, 1975, 1980), Meadows Museum in Dallas (1980), and McNay Art Museum in San Antonio (1985).
By the early 1970s he was printing etchings on behalf of Miró and producing jewelry for Peretti in his Esplugues workshop. Around that time he also met the British landscape architect Russell Page, of whom he viewed himself as a disciple. From the mid-1970s he again spent extended periods in New York, where his circle included Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Donald Sultan, Bryan Hunt, Beverly Pepper, Vincent Desiderio, Kenneth Frampton, and Robert Hughes.
He was also the designer of the 1992 Olympic medals, for which on his insistence real gold was used for the first time.That same year he received the Creu de Sant Jordi Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya, in recognition of his role in Barcelona's public sculpture program. In 2000 he became a member of the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi.
Corberó died in April 2017, aged 81, and was buried at Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.
Corberó's monumental sculptures can be seen in many places throughout Catalonia, including Barcelona, Esplugues de Llobregat, El Prat de Llobregat, Sabadell, Terrassa, and Cassà de la Selva. Other works are in Palma de Mallorca, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, London, Beirut, Dubai, and Chicago, as well as in numerous museums such as the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Espai Corberó
In 1968, Corberó started acquiring land, including a former potato farm, bordering Montserrat Street in the Barcelona suburb of Esplugues de Llobregat, not far from where his parents lived. He developed it into a highly elaborate complex of spaces, known as of 2022 as "Corberó's space" (Espai Corberó).
The complex encompasses some eight acres spread over nine interconnected buildings with a dozen courtyards, all nestled among more than 300 archways.
While Corberó was alive, the property was partly devoted to hosting artists-in-residence as well as his own home. The sprawling compound includes a significant share of his life's work and personal collections, and he kept building it up until his death.
In July 2022, it was reported that Corberó's heirs would sell the complex to the municipality of Esplugues for development as a cultural property. It opened to visitors on 18 May 2024, on the occasion of International Museum Day.
Corberó's patrilineal family has its roots in Lleida, where the family held a tradition of metalworking, especially in bronze. Corberó's grandfather Pere Corberó i Casals (1875-1959) was an entrepreneur and artist whose works included the bronze memorial on the birthplace of Enrique Granados in Lleida. The Corberó foundry produced sculptures by prominent Catalan sculptors of the time such as Pablo Gargallo, Josep Viladomat and Frederic Marès. It was also an industrial and commercial business that sold bronze doors, chandeliers, fountains, and other decorative items, with a showroom in downtown Barcelona at Rambla de Catalunya 105, and a workshop nearby at Carrer Aribau 103.
Corberó's father, Xavier Corberó i Trepat (1901-1981), also worked in the family bronze workshop. During the Spanish Civil War, Corberó i Trepat fought in the Spanish Republican Armed Forces and was separated from his family. Corberó's mother Montserrat, born Olivella i Vidal, passed away in 1936 while giving birth to his younger brother, who in turn died from smallpox a few years later.
Corberó lived his childhood through the turmoil and scarcity of the civil war and early years of Francoist Spain. In 1950 he enrolled at Escola Massana, and in 1953 volunteered for military service in the Spanish Air Force. In 1955 he lived briefly in Paris and Stockholm, then in London where he was the first-ever Spanish student at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He then went on to work for a while at the Medici Foundry in Lausanne.
In Barcelona in the early 1960s he befriended Ricardo Bofill, Antonio Gades, Luis Marsans, and Manuel Viola. In 1962 he moved to New York City at Viola's suggestion, where he spent time with Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Man Ray before moving back to Barcelona in the mid-1960s. In the ensuing years he immersed himself further in the artistic community of Barcelona and Cadaqués, developing a close friendship with Salvador Dalí (whom he described as his "first patron”) as well as with Jorge Castillo, Robert Llimós , Joan Miró, Elsa Peretti and Josep Lluís Sert, among others.
Corberó had his first metal sculptures exhibited in 1955 at the third Hispano-American Biennial Exhibition. He participated in successive sessions of the avant-garde Saló de maig exhibition in Barcelona and won awards there in 1960 and 1961. He had his first solo exhibition in Munich in 1963, for which he received a Gold Medal from the State of Bavaria. Later solo exhibitions included shows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1964), Staempfli Gallery in New York (1966, 1975, 1980), Meadows Museum in Dallas (1980), and McNay Art Museum in San Antonio (1985).
By the early 1970s he was printing etchings on behalf of Miró and producing jewelry for Peretti in his Esplugues workshop. Around that time he also met the British landscape architect Russell Page, of whom he viewed himself as a disciple. From the mid-1970s he again spent extended periods in New York, where his circle included Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Donald Sultan, Bryan Hunt, Beverly Pepper, Vincent Desiderio, Kenneth Frampton, and Robert Hughes.
He was also the designer of the 1992 Olympic medals, for which on his insistence real gold was used for the first time.That same year he received the Creu de Sant Jordi Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya, in recognition of his role in Barcelona's public sculpture program. In 2000 he became a member of the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi.
Corberó died in April 2017, aged 81, and was buried at Montjuïc Cemetery in Barcelona.
Corberó's monumental sculptures can be seen in many places throughout Catalonia, including Barcelona, Esplugues de Llobregat, El Prat de Llobregat, Sabadell, Terrassa, and Cassà de la Selva. Other works are in Palma de Mallorca, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, London, Beirut, Dubai, and Chicago, as well as in numerous museums such as the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the Nassau County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Espai Corberó
In 1968, Corberó started acquiring land, including a former potato farm, bordering Montserrat Street in the Barcelona suburb of Esplugues de Llobregat, not far from where his parents lived. He developed it into a highly elaborate complex of spaces, known as of 2022 as "Corberó's space" (Espai Corberó).
The complex encompasses some eight acres spread over nine interconnected buildings with a dozen courtyards, all nestled among more than 300 archways.
While Corberó was alive, the property was partly devoted to hosting artists-in-residence as well as his own home. The sprawling compound includes a significant share of his life's work and personal collections, and he kept building it up until his death.
In July 2022, it was reported that Corberó's heirs would sell the complex to the municipality of Esplugues for development as a cultural property. It opened to visitors on 18 May 2024, on the occasion of International Museum Day.
Frank Croft Frank Croft (born 1952 in Denver, Colorado) is essentially a self-taught artist. Over the years he painted in his spare time, exhibiting his work in solo and group shows as early as 1984. In 1983, Croft moved to Santa Fe. Once there, he began to paint with a group of artists loosely affiliated with Eli Levin. Croft, along with Carol Mothner and David Barbero, would meet on Wednesday nights in Levin's studio to etch, paint and discuss art. The group began as one focused on printmaking, but over the years shifted its focus to oil painting. Until recently, however, his artistic career took a back seat to his career as an art dealer. Yet, one could not have existed without the other.
Croft has dealt in the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists and Los Cinco Pintores for over twenty years. The artists of these schools, E.L. Blumenschein, E. Martin Hennings and Victor Higgins to name a few, are his main artistic inspiration. Handling paintings by these artists has given Croft a direct link to their technique and their subjects; subjects that Croft explores in his art. The unique landscape of northern New Mexico, its churches and its Native American culture, are expressed in his paintings.
The mixing of colors is an integral element of Croft's painting. Achieving the right tone and value in his color consumes Croft long before a painting begins to take shape. His aim is to artistically match the intense light of New Mexico and how it affects the landscape.
As Croft states, "I find that in my paintings no color straight out of the tube will do justice to my sense of color. I have a certain palette that is unique to my work and then from that base of color there are an infinite number of color possibilities. Every artist of note works with a unique set of colors on their palate that is their own. It has taken a long time for me to develop this color strategy and a new color addition rarely appears. When a new color does find its way onto my palette it usually involves a tedious study to get the color the way I want it."
Croft’s work is featured in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and New Mexico Highlands University.
biographical material: Owings Gallery, AskArt
Croft has dealt in the paintings of the Taos Society of Artists and Los Cinco Pintores for over twenty years. The artists of these schools, E.L. Blumenschein, E. Martin Hennings and Victor Higgins to name a few, are his main artistic inspiration. Handling paintings by these artists has given Croft a direct link to their technique and their subjects; subjects that Croft explores in his art. The unique landscape of northern New Mexico, its churches and its Native American culture, are expressed in his paintings.
The mixing of colors is an integral element of Croft's painting. Achieving the right tone and value in his color consumes Croft long before a painting begins to take shape. His aim is to artistically match the intense light of New Mexico and how it affects the landscape.
As Croft states, "I find that in my paintings no color straight out of the tube will do justice to my sense of color. I have a certain palette that is unique to my work and then from that base of color there are an infinite number of color possibilities. Every artist of note works with a unique set of colors on their palate that is their own. It has taken a long time for me to develop this color strategy and a new color addition rarely appears. When a new color does find its way onto my palette it usually involves a tedious study to get the color the way I want it."
Croft’s work is featured in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and New Mexico Highlands University.
biographical material: Owings Gallery, AskArt
Doris Cross Doris Cross spent much of her life in New York, where she studied art under the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann throughout the1920's and 1930's. In 1972, she settled in Santa Fe, where she became a well-known figure in the avant-garde artistic community.
Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Keith Crown Keith Crown was born in Keokuk, Iowa and grew up in Gary, Indiana. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1936–40. Between 1940 and 1941, Crown was an instructor of art at Luther College before being inducted into the Army. During World War II, he was an Infantry Artist and Staff Sergeant as well as a field correspondent providing combat-area illustrations for Yank magazine . He was awarded a Bronze Star during the War.
After the War he returned to the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1946 and joining the faculty at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles as an instructor of art later that year. He taught there until 1983.
In 1947, he had his first one-man show at the M.H. deYoung Museum in San Francisco. He was awarded a sabbatical leave in 1956 when he visited Taos, New Mexico, for four months. A second sabbatical leave occurred in 1964 when he spent time as a Visiting Professor of Painting at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Through an act of vandalism in 1965, Crown lost over one hundred paintings.
He continued working, becoming a Visiting Professor of Painting at the University of Calgary at Alberta, Canada, during the summer months. The pattern of doing visiting professorships during summers continued with positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Portland State University, the University of Illinois and the University of Missouri, Columbia. Crown also gave numerous lecture-demonstrations and workshops and was an artist in residence at several colleges including Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
He also spent summers and sabbaticals painting in Massachusetts and as far away as England and the Netherlands.
Crown spent considerable time painting and writing while working in Taos, New Mexico, and was an active participant in the Taos art scene. He built an adobe house on 7 acres in Talpa, a town near Taos, where he spent his summers from 1972 until 1998. Although he continued traveling widely, he stayed in Taos part of each year.
Crown preferred to paint his watercolors outdoors rather than in a studio. Although he experimented with acrylics, oils and other mediums, he concentrated on watercolors throughout his life. He especially enjoyed painting around Taos, New Mexico, in desert terrain. Crown used various means to apply his paint which is often colorful, including brushes, razor knives, sponges, a water can, a spray bottle, string and nails. He also used an air-brush which he described as providing a "distinguished character" to his paintings. He typically sketched before beginning a painting. Former students have commented that he was known for his productivity, starting and finishing a painting the same day. He has signed different sides of his paintings so they could be hung in different ways.
In 1959 Crown served as president of the National Watercolor Society (NWS, formerly the California Watercolor Society) and was awarded its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. In 2003 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Watercolor Honor Society. He was also one of the founding board of directors of the Los Angeles chapter of Artist's Equity.
He retired from teaching in 1983 and moved to Columbia, Missouri with his wife. He died on January 31, 2010, and is buried in Palos Verdes, California.
Crown’s paintings have appeared in more than 200 juried and solo exhibitions. His work is represented in many public and private museums and collections, including the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University, Providence, RI; Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO; the Gene Crain Collection of California Watercolors, Laguna Beach, CA; Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Missouri Student Unions Public Arts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; and others.
Biographical sources include: AskArt, Luther College
After the War he returned to the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in fine art in 1946 and joining the faculty at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles as an instructor of art later that year. He taught there until 1983.
In 1947, he had his first one-man show at the M.H. deYoung Museum in San Francisco. He was awarded a sabbatical leave in 1956 when he visited Taos, New Mexico, for four months. A second sabbatical leave occurred in 1964 when he spent time as a Visiting Professor of Painting at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
Through an act of vandalism in 1965, Crown lost over one hundred paintings.
He continued working, becoming a Visiting Professor of Painting at the University of Calgary at Alberta, Canada, during the summer months. The pattern of doing visiting professorships during summers continued with positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Portland State University, the University of Illinois and the University of Missouri, Columbia. Crown also gave numerous lecture-demonstrations and workshops and was an artist in residence at several colleges including Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
He also spent summers and sabbaticals painting in Massachusetts and as far away as England and the Netherlands.
Crown spent considerable time painting and writing while working in Taos, New Mexico, and was an active participant in the Taos art scene. He built an adobe house on 7 acres in Talpa, a town near Taos, where he spent his summers from 1972 until 1998. Although he continued traveling widely, he stayed in Taos part of each year.
Crown preferred to paint his watercolors outdoors rather than in a studio. Although he experimented with acrylics, oils and other mediums, he concentrated on watercolors throughout his life. He especially enjoyed painting around Taos, New Mexico, in desert terrain. Crown used various means to apply his paint which is often colorful, including brushes, razor knives, sponges, a water can, a spray bottle, string and nails. He also used an air-brush which he described as providing a "distinguished character" to his paintings. He typically sketched before beginning a painting. Former students have commented that he was known for his productivity, starting and finishing a painting the same day. He has signed different sides of his paintings so they could be hung in different ways.
In 1959 Crown served as president of the National Watercolor Society (NWS, formerly the California Watercolor Society) and was awarded its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. In 2003 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Watercolor Honor Society. He was also one of the founding board of directors of the Los Angeles chapter of Artist's Equity.
He retired from teaching in 1983 and moved to Columbia, Missouri with his wife. He died on January 31, 2010, and is buried in Palos Verdes, California.
Crown’s paintings have appeared in more than 200 juried and solo exhibitions. His work is represented in many public and private museums and collections, including the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University, Providence, RI; Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles; Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO; the Gene Crain Collection of California Watercolors, Laguna Beach, CA; Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Missouri Student Unions Public Arts Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; and others.
Biographical sources include: AskArt, Luther College
Kinga Czerska Born in Krakow, Poland in 1973, Kinga Czerska sees the world composed of an intense amount of connections and information that the mind processes, with a never ending amount of nuances and details - a perspective that empowers her to create intricately woven paintings that capture light, movement and energy.
Throughout her earlier career Czerska lived in eight major US cities and was immersed in studying different subjects as she created flowing and undulating hard edge abstraction pieces, culminating in a commission of a 400-foot mural by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at 50 West Side Highway in New York.
Czerska began moving away from the flat hard edge abstraction of her earlier career, shattering the flat shapes to unearth the hidden energy and structures that lie beneath the seemingly stable outside layer. To capture these depths Czerska dove into weaving, wood sculpture, ceramics, basket weaving, knitting, ribbon work, glass, and metal for four years before returning to painting - the mediium of her first and true love.
To produce works that emanate this intrinsic energy from within, Czerska employed an almost engineered architectural approach, with works comprised of multiple translucent layers of paint and textures on wood panels as she built the interior structure. Once satisfied with the interior world , she would begin to mine what was hidden by meticulously removing sections of layers. What is unearthed is an infinitely elegant, intricate world pulsating with energy and light.
The resulting meditative works are enigmatic, balanced, subtle and atmospheric, both in the visual nature of the paintings themselves, and in how they interact with the surrounding space: the type of light, the quality of light, even the time of day can impact the viewing experience. Her highly complex works slowly reveal themselves upon the viewer’s patient, even intimate consideration.
In her new works, Kinga explores the invisible architecture of connection—the hidden networks that organize our natural world and quietly shape our experience of it:
For years, my paintings have investigated the patterns that link forests, rivers, galaxies, and human relationships. In this new series, those ideas become more tangible. Delicate linear structures emerge, suggesting the unseen fields of energy, memory, and communication that exist beneath what we can easily perceive. Just as trees communicate through underground fungal networks and living systems organize themselves through relationships rather than isolation, the work proposes that connection is not something we create, but something we rediscover.
Rather than illustrating nature, these works invite viewers to experience it differently—to consider that beneath the visible world exists an elegant, dynamic structure connecting all living things.... an invitation to pause, to notice, and perhaps to recognize that we have always been part of this larger network.
Czerska devotes her time to the study of patterns and structures found all around us: in architecture, engineering, flora and fauna, stars and galaxies, the human body and psyche. Her quest is to explore the intricacies of these environments and how their details might interlace, change, shift, and reconfigure to create a graceful, precise, elegant and balanced world.
Czerska has exhibited extensively throughout the US including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Aspen, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Santa Fe and Chicago. She has produced commissions for many collectors in the US, Europe, Caribbean, Australia and throughout Asia. In addition, she has been awarded several public commissions and attended prestigious Residency Programs, including Art/Omi and International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York.
Throughout her earlier career Czerska lived in eight major US cities and was immersed in studying different subjects as she created flowing and undulating hard edge abstraction pieces, culminating in a commission of a 400-foot mural by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council at 50 West Side Highway in New York.
Czerska began moving away from the flat hard edge abstraction of her earlier career, shattering the flat shapes to unearth the hidden energy and structures that lie beneath the seemingly stable outside layer. To capture these depths Czerska dove into weaving, wood sculpture, ceramics, basket weaving, knitting, ribbon work, glass, and metal for four years before returning to painting - the mediium of her first and true love.
To produce works that emanate this intrinsic energy from within, Czerska employed an almost engineered architectural approach, with works comprised of multiple translucent layers of paint and textures on wood panels as she built the interior structure. Once satisfied with the interior world , she would begin to mine what was hidden by meticulously removing sections of layers. What is unearthed is an infinitely elegant, intricate world pulsating with energy and light.
The resulting meditative works are enigmatic, balanced, subtle and atmospheric, both in the visual nature of the paintings themselves, and in how they interact with the surrounding space: the type of light, the quality of light, even the time of day can impact the viewing experience. Her highly complex works slowly reveal themselves upon the viewer’s patient, even intimate consideration.
In her new works, Kinga explores the invisible architecture of connection—the hidden networks that organize our natural world and quietly shape our experience of it:
For years, my paintings have investigated the patterns that link forests, rivers, galaxies, and human relationships. In this new series, those ideas become more tangible. Delicate linear structures emerge, suggesting the unseen fields of energy, memory, and communication that exist beneath what we can easily perceive. Just as trees communicate through underground fungal networks and living systems organize themselves through relationships rather than isolation, the work proposes that connection is not something we create, but something we rediscover.
Rather than illustrating nature, these works invite viewers to experience it differently—to consider that beneath the visible world exists an elegant, dynamic structure connecting all living things.... an invitation to pause, to notice, and perhaps to recognize that we have always been part of this larger network.
Czerska devotes her time to the study of patterns and structures found all around us: in architecture, engineering, flora and fauna, stars and galaxies, the human body and psyche. Her quest is to explore the intricacies of these environments and how their details might interlace, change, shift, and reconfigure to create a graceful, precise, elegant and balanced world.
Czerska has exhibited extensively throughout the US including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Aspen, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Santa Fe and Chicago. She has produced commissions for many collectors in the US, Europe, Caribbean, Australia and throughout Asia. In addition, she has been awarded several public commissions and attended prestigious Residency Programs, including Art/Omi and International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York.
Lavi Daniel Lavi Daniel (b. 1954) was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and has been painting since he was a small child, influenced by time spent in his grandfather’s sculpting studio.
At age 17, he won a four -year scholarship to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but left after six months, opting to pursue self-study. He found a room in a redwood cabin on the Mendocino coast that functioned as a studio, while living in a tepee he and his cousin built on logging land nearby.
He met his future wife, Diane, in 1975. Together, they took what little money they had and traveled to the rain forests of Borneo, where they collected rare antique textiles, a trade that supported them for the next 25 years.
In 1985 Daniel had his first exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, where he showed abstract paintings built with a figurative means, following a theme of "Threat and Shelter.” The following works then shifted strongly, marking what would be a lifelong pattern of investigating a direction deeply, then abruptly diverging into new areas of exploration. Daniel's next works were finger applied oil paintings, with a vocabulary devised to carry on a conversation about the relationship between inner and outer phenomena, consciousness, and manifestation.
In 1995, his wife was diagnosed with cancer, which took her life five years later. Daniel reacted to his wife's death by exploring pastels and creating what curator Anne Ayres called "light-drenched fields of brilliant atmospheric color."
By 2003, Daniel moved from these amorphous fields in pastel into more abstract architectonic compositions, shifting scale and creating parables of space.
Around 2015, Daniel began to make hard edge abstract colored pencil drawings that he would later make into large scale oil paintings. He followed a new theme he called ”The Dance of Perpetuity:"
"The inspiration for this body of work comes from seeing images of the birds of paradise of Papua New Guinea. They present in spectacular feather costumes, preparing their stages, and performing songs and dance for the purpose of spreading their genes. I construe their performance as a 'dance of perpetuity.' That prompt, provides license to move toward extreme opulence, indulging in intense color relationships, intent on expressing the depths of joy and promise."
He continued in this direction over the next six years, at times shifting the vocabulary's source as a means of varying the imagery. The colored fragments would receive inspiration from the ocean and rock shapes of the north coast of California, and later from the hoodoo and cloud formations of New Mexico.
2022 saw yet another evolution in Daniel’s work, with small pastels and large scale oil paintings inspired by the rediscovery of a pastel drawing that Daniel made at the age of 7, assuming the perspective of the young boy some sixty years later.
Daniel continues to refine and develop this trajectory in 2024.
“I’ll begin with some color combinations in mind,” Daniel says of his most recent work, “then dive in with a discipline that requires little or no pre-consideration. The first marks are in search of forms and relationships that portend the nature and character of the whole. After that, the painting seems to make itself.”
Daniel has had solo exhibitions at the James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles; Long Beach Art Museum, Long Beach; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; and Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, among others.
He has participated in group exhibitions at University of Rhode Island, Kingston; Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, Washington; L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, among others.
Daniel currently lives and works with his partner, the interior designer Susan Stella, in Tesuque, NM, and Fort Bragg, northern California.
At age 17, he won a four -year scholarship to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but left after six months, opting to pursue self-study. He found a room in a redwood cabin on the Mendocino coast that functioned as a studio, while living in a tepee he and his cousin built on logging land nearby.
He met his future wife, Diane, in 1975. Together, they took what little money they had and traveled to the rain forests of Borneo, where they collected rare antique textiles, a trade that supported them for the next 25 years.
In 1985 Daniel had his first exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, where he showed abstract paintings built with a figurative means, following a theme of "Threat and Shelter.” The following works then shifted strongly, marking what would be a lifelong pattern of investigating a direction deeply, then abruptly diverging into new areas of exploration. Daniel's next works were finger applied oil paintings, with a vocabulary devised to carry on a conversation about the relationship between inner and outer phenomena, consciousness, and manifestation.
In 1995, his wife was diagnosed with cancer, which took her life five years later. Daniel reacted to his wife's death by exploring pastels and creating what curator Anne Ayres called "light-drenched fields of brilliant atmospheric color."
By 2003, Daniel moved from these amorphous fields in pastel into more abstract architectonic compositions, shifting scale and creating parables of space.
Around 2015, Daniel began to make hard edge abstract colored pencil drawings that he would later make into large scale oil paintings. He followed a new theme he called ”The Dance of Perpetuity:"
"The inspiration for this body of work comes from seeing images of the birds of paradise of Papua New Guinea. They present in spectacular feather costumes, preparing their stages, and performing songs and dance for the purpose of spreading their genes. I construe their performance as a 'dance of perpetuity.' That prompt, provides license to move toward extreme opulence, indulging in intense color relationships, intent on expressing the depths of joy and promise."
He continued in this direction over the next six years, at times shifting the vocabulary's source as a means of varying the imagery. The colored fragments would receive inspiration from the ocean and rock shapes of the north coast of California, and later from the hoodoo and cloud formations of New Mexico.
2022 saw yet another evolution in Daniel’s work, with small pastels and large scale oil paintings inspired by the rediscovery of a pastel drawing that Daniel made at the age of 7, assuming the perspective of the young boy some sixty years later.
Daniel continues to refine and develop this trajectory in 2024.
“I’ll begin with some color combinations in mind,” Daniel says of his most recent work, “then dive in with a discipline that requires little or no pre-consideration. The first marks are in search of forms and relationships that portend the nature and character of the whole. After that, the painting seems to make itself.”
Daniel has had solo exhibitions at the James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles; Long Beach Art Museum, Long Beach; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii; Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; and Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, among others.
He has participated in group exhibitions at University of Rhode Island, Kingston; Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, Washington; L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, among others.
Daniel currently lives and works with his partner, the interior designer Susan Stella, in Tesuque, NM, and Fort Bragg, northern California.
Andrew Michael Dasburg Andrew Michael Dasburg was an American modernist painter and an early exponent of cubism. Born in Paris, Dasburg joined the Art Students League of New York on a scholarship in 1902.
In 1909 Dasburg revisited Paris and joined the modernist circle of artists living there, including Morgan Russell, Jo Davidson, and Arthur Lee. During a trip to London that same year he married sculptor Grace Mott Johnson. Johnson returned to the United States early the next year, but Dasburg stayed in Paris where he met Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein, and became influenced by the paintings of Cézanne and Cubism.
Dasburg returned to New York, and he and Johnson became active members of the artist community. Dasburg exhibited three oils and a sculpture at the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," better known the Armory Show, which opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory in 1913 and introduced New Yorkers to Modern art.
In 1918 he was invited to Taos, New Mexico by Mabel Dodge, and returning in 1919, Johnson joined him there. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1921, Dasburg integrated the boxy traditional construction styles in New Mexico into his Cubist art.
In both New York and Taos, he was part of the social milieu that included Georgia O'Keeffe and Gertrude Stein, and a close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A painting named The Absence of Mabel Dodge was allegedly painted to inflame the jealousy of her then-lover, mutual friend John Reed (it was a pointed reminder of a peyote celebration in which the two had shared), and for four years Dasburg and Reed's other lover Louise Bryant carried on an affair. The elderly Dasburg appeared posthumously as himself in the movie about Reed and Bryant, Reds, although he "curiously ... does not speak of his intimacy with either". He was also involved for some time with Ida Rauh, a co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and the two of them were friends with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, and helped Lawrence recover from a bout of tuberculosis that nearly got him refused entry to the U.S. at the border with Mexico.
Dasburg died in his home in Taos, New Mexico, on August 13, 1979, at age 92. Following his death, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe held a 96-work retrospective exhibition funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts which traveled to four other Western states. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, among others.
In 1909 Dasburg revisited Paris and joined the modernist circle of artists living there, including Morgan Russell, Jo Davidson, and Arthur Lee. During a trip to London that same year he married sculptor Grace Mott Johnson. Johnson returned to the United States early the next year, but Dasburg stayed in Paris where he met Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Leo Stein, and became influenced by the paintings of Cézanne and Cubism.
Dasburg returned to New York, and he and Johnson became active members of the artist community. Dasburg exhibited three oils and a sculpture at the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," better known the Armory Show, which opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory in 1913 and introduced New Yorkers to Modern art.
In 1918 he was invited to Taos, New Mexico by Mabel Dodge, and returning in 1919, Johnson joined him there. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1921, Dasburg integrated the boxy traditional construction styles in New Mexico into his Cubist art.
In both New York and Taos, he was part of the social milieu that included Georgia O'Keeffe and Gertrude Stein, and a close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A painting named The Absence of Mabel Dodge was allegedly painted to inflame the jealousy of her then-lover, mutual friend John Reed (it was a pointed reminder of a peyote celebration in which the two had shared), and for four years Dasburg and Reed's other lover Louise Bryant carried on an affair. The elderly Dasburg appeared posthumously as himself in the movie about Reed and Bryant, Reds, although he "curiously ... does not speak of his intimacy with either". He was also involved for some time with Ida Rauh, a co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and the two of them were friends with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen, and helped Lawrence recover from a bout of tuberculosis that nearly got him refused entry to the U.S. at the border with Mexico.
Dasburg died in his home in Taos, New Mexico, on August 13, 1979, at age 92. Following his death, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe held a 96-work retrospective exhibition funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts which traveled to four other Western states. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, among others.
Julio de Diego Julio de Diego was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1900. In 1922, when his family objected to his artistic ambitions, de Diego left home and moved to Paris. Over the next several years, de Diego designed sets for the opera, danced in the ballet, and fought in Africa with the Spanish Army. In 1926, he moved to the United States. There, he settled in Chicago and worked as a designer and illustrator for magazines and catalogues. The first major show of his work took place in Chicago in 1932. De Diego spent some time painting for the WPA. He lived in NY for many years and married the actress and entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee. He died in Florida in 1979.
De Diego’s work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum, among other public and private collections.
De Diego’s work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Montclair Art Museum, among other public and private collections.
Sonia Delaunay Sonia Delaunay, originally born Sofia Ilinitchna Terk in the Ukraine, was a Russian painter, illustrator, and textile designer who pioneered early abstract art in the years before World War I.
Delaunay grew up in St. Petersburg. She studied drawing in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in 1905 moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists. Delaunay was regarded as the the center of the Paris art world in the early 1900s. She married the artist Robert Delaunay in 1910, by which time she was painting in the style known as Orphism, which involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure color. She extended Orphist principles to the design of fabrics, pottery decoration, stage sets, and other applied arts.
Among her most important works were her Orphist illustrations for a poem by Blaise Cendrars entitled "La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France" in 1913. The resulting volume was a landmark in modern book production.
During the 1920s Delaunay designed textiles and dresses. Her use of abstract color harmonies had a strong influence on international fashion. She returned to painting in the 1930s, joining the Abstraction-Création association in 1931. She and Robert Delaunay became involved in public art projects, and they collaborated on vast murals for the Paris Exposition of 1937. After her husband’s death in 1941, Delaunay continued to work as a painter and designer, and she lived to see the mounting of retrospectives of her work by major museums from the 1950s onward. In 1964 she became the only woman to have had an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in her own lifetime.
Delaunay grew up in St. Petersburg. She studied drawing in Karlsruhe, Germany, and in 1905 moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the Post-Impressionists and the Fauvists. Delaunay was regarded as the the center of the Paris art world in the early 1900s. She married the artist Robert Delaunay in 1910, by which time she was painting in the style known as Orphism, which involved the harmonious juxtaposition of areas of pure color. She extended Orphist principles to the design of fabrics, pottery decoration, stage sets, and other applied arts.
Among her most important works were her Orphist illustrations for a poem by Blaise Cendrars entitled "La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France" in 1913. The resulting volume was a landmark in modern book production.
During the 1920s Delaunay designed textiles and dresses. Her use of abstract color harmonies had a strong influence on international fashion. She returned to painting in the 1930s, joining the Abstraction-Création association in 1931. She and Robert Delaunay became involved in public art projects, and they collaborated on vast murals for the Paris Exposition of 1937. After her husband’s death in 1941, Delaunay continued to work as a painter and designer, and she lived to see the mounting of retrospectives of her work by major museums from the 1950s onward. In 1964 she became the only woman to have had an exhibition at the Louvre Museum in her own lifetime.
Richard W. Dempsey Richard W. Dempsey was born in Ogden, Utah, September 14, 1909. His youth was spent in Oakland, California where he attended Sacramento Junior College (1929-31) as an art major and then studied at the following institutions: The California School of Arts and Crafts (1932-34) in Oakland, California; the Students Art Center (1935-40). He held his first one-man exhibition in Oakland, 1935, then headed for San Francisco where he held three exhibitions. In 1941, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work as an engineering draftsman with the Federal Power Commission.
Dempsey also studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He studied sculpture with Sargent Johnson, painting with Maurice Logan, Raymond Strong, Katherine Gans, Edward Leslie, Sidney Lemos and lithography with James Wells. He also worked as an engineering draftsman for the US government. In 1946, along with Elizabeth Catlett, he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for a series of paintings of outstanding American Negroes. In 1951, he was awarded a Purchase Award in the Corcoran Gallery's Tenth Annual Exhibition.
Dempsey was a prolific painter and worked on as many as six canvases at one time, switching as his moods changed. His paintings were highly influenced by colors in his Caribbean environment, using them to express feelings of emotions and dimension. His sensitivity to colors was heightened by frequent trips to Jamaica and Haiti. With Dempsey, color, texture, and form unite in his later abstract paintings to compose symphonic poems for the eye of the beholder.
Dempsey also studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He studied sculpture with Sargent Johnson, painting with Maurice Logan, Raymond Strong, Katherine Gans, Edward Leslie, Sidney Lemos and lithography with James Wells. He also worked as an engineering draftsman for the US government. In 1946, along with Elizabeth Catlett, he was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for a series of paintings of outstanding American Negroes. In 1951, he was awarded a Purchase Award in the Corcoran Gallery's Tenth Annual Exhibition.
Dempsey was a prolific painter and worked on as many as six canvases at one time, switching as his moods changed. His paintings were highly influenced by colors in his Caribbean environment, using them to express feelings of emotions and dimension. His sensitivity to colors was heightened by frequent trips to Jamaica and Haiti. With Dempsey, color, texture, and form unite in his later abstract paintings to compose symphonic poems for the eye of the beholder.
Angelo di Benedetto The son of Italian immigrants from the Salerno province in southern Italy, as a teenager Angelo di Benedetto worked as a truck driver in the mornings and a bartender in the afternoons to study at the Cooper Union Art School in New York City (1930-34) from which he graduated with a certificate in freehand drawing. He won a scholarship to the Boston Museum Art School where he studied for three years, beginning in 1934, with Russian émigré painter Alexandre Jacovleff, a member of Mir Isskustva (World of Art) in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution. In 1936 he painted a religious mural for St. Michael's Grove in Paterson, New Jersey. The following year he entered his first juried exhibition at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey, winning first prize and first honorable mention.
Before World War II, di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States in his car and trailer doing regional paintings. In 1941 he did what is considered the first authentic version of George Washington Crossing the Delaware, a contrast to the well-known painting on the same subject (1851) by German-born painter, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. During the war di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission to Africa in 1941 before the Allied invasion, serving as director of camouflage, foreman of native laborers and an interpreter while based in Eritrea. The following year he received a direct commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the First Photo Mapping Squadron, leading groups as a guide and interpreter and doing ground control. During his free time in Africa, he sketched and painted the local population and his fellow servicemen.
Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado impressed by the state's physical grandeur and healthful climate. After the war, he lived briefly for about a year in Rangely, a small town in northwest Colorado where he traveled and sketched. But finding it a little too remote, he settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947, his home base for the rest of his life.
In the early 1950s he did woodcuts in a modernist style, including Remembrance, showing his two young daughters. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism at that time, he began considering the elimination of the image from his work. By the end of the decade, he had decided that "the circle pure and simple was one of the most familiar symbols of mankind and that it metaphored into everything." At the same time, he noted that "99% of the abstract painters shied away from using [the circle]. When they didn't, they slaughtered it, murdered it and buried it. So it became my motif."
For more than three decades he explored the circle in paint, sculpture and shaped canvas. Two examples of the last-named medium are his Red CQ and Black C-1, both from 1969. Because abstraction touched upon his deep feelings and spirituality, he felt he could make visible that part of life which "we feel but almost never see." His fascination with the circle also relates to his belief that to effect the dialogue existing between object and maker; the artist must "create archetypal shapes [that have universal appeal], not symbols to reflect simply the intrinsic beauty of the shape itself."
During the 1960s and 1970s, he received other major sculpture commissions: an 80-foot-long copper wall, Jewish Community Center, Denver (1962); sculpture garden, General Rose Hospital, Denver (1964); Fountain, First National Bank of Dallas (1966); Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, Pueblo, Colorado (1969); neighborhood park sculpture, Yonkers, New York (1971); High School Park, Northglenn, Colorado (1974); ice skating rink sculpture, Pueblo (1976).
Fate was not as kind to his mural which the Colorado Supreme Court justices commissioned him to paint in 1976 for the Colorado Judicial Building from a field of twenty-two candidates. With his former student, Phyllis Montrose as his principal assistant along with three others, he spent a year and a half executing the mural. Entitled Justice Through the Ages (aka Lawgivers), it depicted sixty individuals from ancient Babylon’s King Hammurabi to former U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren. Measuring 20 feet by 180 feet, it was called at its dedication “the largest figurative mural in America.” Although for more than a generation it sprawled across the ceiling of the open-aired first floor of the Colorado Judicial Building, it was not saved when the building was demolished in 2010 to make way for the block-long Ralph L. Carr Justice Complex.
Reflecting on his distinguished career in his twilight years, he described art “’as a type of sanity,’ an activity which allows an individual to experiment through different styles and media and to explore the intellectual and psychological aspects of his or her life.” Each time he entered his studio he was pushed to explore further, to “test his sanity.” This freedom proved crucial in the creation of his multi-faceted oeuvre.
Angelo di Benedetto was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Denver, and Santa Fe.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; the Denver Art Museum; Western History Art Collection, Denver Public Library; and the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Denver, among others.
Before World War II, di Benedetto traveled extensively around the United States in his car and trailer doing regional paintings. In 1941 he did what is considered the first authentic version of George Washington Crossing the Delaware, a contrast to the well-known painting on the same subject (1851) by German-born painter, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. During the war di Benedetto volunteered for a secret mission to Africa in 1941 before the Allied invasion, serving as director of camouflage, foreman of native laborers and an interpreter while based in Eritrea. The following year he received a direct commission as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the First Photo Mapping Squadron, leading groups as a guide and interpreter and doing ground control. During his free time in Africa, he sketched and painted the local population and his fellow servicemen.
Like many other servicemen stationed at the time in Colorado, di Benedetto chose to remain in Colorado impressed by the state's physical grandeur and healthful climate. After the war, he lived briefly for about a year in Rangely, a small town in northwest Colorado where he traveled and sketched. But finding it a little too remote, he settled in the old mining town of Central City in 1947, his home base for the rest of his life.
In the early 1950s he did woodcuts in a modernist style, including Remembrance, showing his two young daughters. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism at that time, he began considering the elimination of the image from his work. By the end of the decade, he had decided that "the circle pure and simple was one of the most familiar symbols of mankind and that it metaphored into everything." At the same time, he noted that "99% of the abstract painters shied away from using [the circle]. When they didn't, they slaughtered it, murdered it and buried it. So it became my motif."
For more than three decades he explored the circle in paint, sculpture and shaped canvas. Two examples of the last-named medium are his Red CQ and Black C-1, both from 1969. Because abstraction touched upon his deep feelings and spirituality, he felt he could make visible that part of life which "we feel but almost never see." His fascination with the circle also relates to his belief that to effect the dialogue existing between object and maker; the artist must "create archetypal shapes [that have universal appeal], not symbols to reflect simply the intrinsic beauty of the shape itself."
During the 1960s and 1970s, he received other major sculpture commissions: an 80-foot-long copper wall, Jewish Community Center, Denver (1962); sculpture garden, General Rose Hospital, Denver (1964); Fountain, First National Bank of Dallas (1966); Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, Pueblo, Colorado (1969); neighborhood park sculpture, Yonkers, New York (1971); High School Park, Northglenn, Colorado (1974); ice skating rink sculpture, Pueblo (1976).
Fate was not as kind to his mural which the Colorado Supreme Court justices commissioned him to paint in 1976 for the Colorado Judicial Building from a field of twenty-two candidates. With his former student, Phyllis Montrose as his principal assistant along with three others, he spent a year and a half executing the mural. Entitled Justice Through the Ages (aka Lawgivers), it depicted sixty individuals from ancient Babylon’s King Hammurabi to former U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren. Measuring 20 feet by 180 feet, it was called at its dedication “the largest figurative mural in America.” Although for more than a generation it sprawled across the ceiling of the open-aired first floor of the Colorado Judicial Building, it was not saved when the building was demolished in 2010 to make way for the block-long Ralph L. Carr Justice Complex.
Reflecting on his distinguished career in his twilight years, he described art “’as a type of sanity,’ an activity which allows an individual to experiment through different styles and media and to explore the intellectual and psychological aspects of his or her life.” Each time he entered his studio he was pushed to explore further, to “test his sanity.” This freedom proved crucial in the creation of his multi-faceted oeuvre.
Angelo di Benedetto was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Denver, and Santa Fe.
His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; the Denver Art Museum; Western History Art Collection, Denver Public Library; and the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Denver, among others.
Attributed to Katherine Sophie Dreier Katherine Sophie Dreier was an American artist, lecturer, patron of the arts and social reformer. Dreier developed in interest in art at a young age and was afforded the opportunity of studying art in the United States and in Europe due to her parents' wealth and progressive attitudes. Her sister Dorothea, a Post-Impressionist painter traveled and studied with her in Europe. She was most influenced by modern art, particularly by her friend Marcel Duchamp. She was co-founder of the Society of Independent Artists and the Société Anonyme, which had the first permanent collection of modern art, representing 175 artists and more than 800 works of art. The collection was donated to Yale University. Her works were exhibited in Europe and the United States, including the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art.
John Edwards Abstract painter and sculptor John Edwards was central to the British art scene in the 1960s and 70s. Edwards is one of Britain's leading abstract artists though he also enjoyed acclaim in the United States. He was a talented teacher and served as head of painting and sculpture at St Martin's School of Art, London, in the 1980s. After retiring from teaching, he maintained a prodigious output of paintings and sculptures over the next 20 years, and showed work regularly in exhibitions in London and abroad.
His forms were influenced by the jazzy, improvisational techniques of the abstract expressionist painters who came into favor in New York after WWII. But his paintings had an architecture that resembled sculptural forms and, conversely, his sculptures had a painterly touch, often light and airy. The curator and critic Jill Lloyd observed: "The power and vitality of the work has much to do with an interplay of opposing forces. Edwards's art is reductive; abstract language of forms is counterbalanced by the artist's emotive and lyrical sense of color."
His forms were influenced by the jazzy, improvisational techniques of the abstract expressionist painters who came into favor in New York after WWII. But his paintings had an architecture that resembled sculptural forms and, conversely, his sculptures had a painterly touch, often light and airy. The curator and critic Jill Lloyd observed: "The power and vitality of the work has much to do with an interplay of opposing forces. Edwards's art is reductive; abstract language of forms is counterbalanced by the artist's emotive and lyrical sense of color."
Norris Embry Norris Embry was an American artist born in Louisville, Kentucky. He grew up in East Orange, New Jersey outside New York City and Evanston, Illinois in the Chicago area, attending public schools through high school. Later, he studied at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland and the Art Institute in Chicago. In the late 1940s, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy; his teacher, the expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, was to have a lasting influence on Embry's work.
During his adolescent years in the Chicago area, Embry developed a keen interest in avant-garde literature, music and art. In 1947 Embry decided to devote his life to painting and, for the next 15 years until the early 1960s, embarked on a nomadic artistic career which would take him from San Francisco to New York, to post-war Europe, as well as Turkey and North Africa.
Amongst the countries in Europe where he took up temporary residence were Italy, France, Germany, Spain, England and Sweden. It was the Mediterranean culture and climate that struck a chord with his heart and his artistic imagination, and in particular, Greece where he returned frequently.
Throughout much of his life, Embry suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. In the mid-1960s, after having sought medical treatment at the Shepphard Pratt Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, he made that city his permanent residence. He continued to live and paint in Baltimore until the last weeks of his life.
After a series of strokes, he died February 17, 1981 and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.
Embry's work is in collections of a number of fine institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.
During his adolescent years in the Chicago area, Embry developed a keen interest in avant-garde literature, music and art. In 1947 Embry decided to devote his life to painting and, for the next 15 years until the early 1960s, embarked on a nomadic artistic career which would take him from San Francisco to New York, to post-war Europe, as well as Turkey and North Africa.
Amongst the countries in Europe where he took up temporary residence were Italy, France, Germany, Spain, England and Sweden. It was the Mediterranean culture and climate that struck a chord with his heart and his artistic imagination, and in particular, Greece where he returned frequently.
Throughout much of his life, Embry suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. In the mid-1960s, after having sought medical treatment at the Shepphard Pratt Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, he made that city his permanent residence. He continued to live and paint in Baltimore until the last weeks of his life.
After a series of strokes, he died February 17, 1981 and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.
Embry's work is in collections of a number of fine institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.
Marcello Fantoni Marcello Fantoni (1915-2011) was an Italian sculptor, ceramicist, metalworker, multi-media artist and designer.
Born in Florence in 1915, Fantoni began studying ceramic art at age 12 in 1927 at the Porta Romana Art Institute in Florence with ceramicist Carlo Guerrini, artistic director of the famed Cantagalli Factory. At the same time, he took sculpture lessons from Libero Andreotti and Bruno Innocenti and drawing lessons from Gianni Vagnetti.
In 1934, Fantoni graduated as an "Art Master" from the institute, and then served a short stint as art director for a ceramics factory in Perugia. In 1936, inside the stables of Villa Fabbricotti (unfortunately completely destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War), Fantoni started his Fantoni Ceramics Factory.There he produced ceramic series as well as unique pieces, sculptures and furnishings. Exhibiting at the Artigianato exhibition in Florence in 1937, his production established itself in line with the most current trends and garnered considerable acclaim. By the start of World War II Fantoni’s melding of ancient Italian pottery techniques with decidedly Modernist elements had won him artistic and commercial success both in Italy and abroad.
After the war years (when Fantoni was involved in the resistance) he began the creative and productive fervor that allowed him to expand his studio. Between the end of the 1940s and the end of the 1950s, the company reached a staff of more than fifty collaborators, including turners and decorators. Among his employees were many students who would become excellent artisans and famous artists in their own right.
He experimented with various materials and formal ideas, drawing from varied influences – Primitivism, Novecento style, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Fantoni gave special emphasis to ancient Etruscan ceramic techniques, glazes and colors, heightening the timeless appeal of his pieces. As well as clay, he also worked in metals to great effect.
Whether created as a series or as a unique piece, every Fantoni piece was ultimately rendered unique by his hand-painting it. The extraordinary diversity of shapes and textures notwithstanding, one the most identifiable qualities of his creations was his painting style. Through the 50s and 60s he made many cubist-inspired pieces painted in colors bordered by sgraffito lines scratched through the paint, in a manner evoking Picasso and Braque. Along with figurative and abstract works, the 60s also saw Fantoni creating brutalist pieces with edgy, angular shapes. In later life, his work took a minimalist turn.
In 1970 Fantoni founded the International School of Ceramic Art, dedicated to teaching ceramic arts and experimentation, where he continued to work and teach until his death.
Maintaining great versatility throughout his career, Fantoni completed projects for public and private buildings, churches, schools, theaters, cinemas, and ships.
Marcello Fantoni died in Florence in 2011 at the age of 95.
His work is in several private collections and in numerous major museums. In the United States, his work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, in New Hampshire in Manchester at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, among others. In the United Kingdom, his work is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art City Gallery in Manchester, and the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. His work is also in Japan at the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto (MoMAK) and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In Italy, his work is at the Museo Internazionale della Ceramica in Faenza (M.I.C.), the Museo Nazionale del Bargello and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi.
Biographical sources include ceramichefantoni.it, archiviyo, donzella
Born in Florence in 1915, Fantoni began studying ceramic art at age 12 in 1927 at the Porta Romana Art Institute in Florence with ceramicist Carlo Guerrini, artistic director of the famed Cantagalli Factory. At the same time, he took sculpture lessons from Libero Andreotti and Bruno Innocenti and drawing lessons from Gianni Vagnetti.
In 1934, Fantoni graduated as an "Art Master" from the institute, and then served a short stint as art director for a ceramics factory in Perugia. In 1936, inside the stables of Villa Fabbricotti (unfortunately completely destroyed during the bombings of the Second World War), Fantoni started his Fantoni Ceramics Factory.There he produced ceramic series as well as unique pieces, sculptures and furnishings. Exhibiting at the Artigianato exhibition in Florence in 1937, his production established itself in line with the most current trends and garnered considerable acclaim. By the start of World War II Fantoni’s melding of ancient Italian pottery techniques with decidedly Modernist elements had won him artistic and commercial success both in Italy and abroad.
After the war years (when Fantoni was involved in the resistance) he began the creative and productive fervor that allowed him to expand his studio. Between the end of the 1940s and the end of the 1950s, the company reached a staff of more than fifty collaborators, including turners and decorators. Among his employees were many students who would become excellent artisans and famous artists in their own right.
He experimented with various materials and formal ideas, drawing from varied influences – Primitivism, Novecento style, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Fantoni gave special emphasis to ancient Etruscan ceramic techniques, glazes and colors, heightening the timeless appeal of his pieces. As well as clay, he also worked in metals to great effect.
Whether created as a series or as a unique piece, every Fantoni piece was ultimately rendered unique by his hand-painting it. The extraordinary diversity of shapes and textures notwithstanding, one the most identifiable qualities of his creations was his painting style. Through the 50s and 60s he made many cubist-inspired pieces painted in colors bordered by sgraffito lines scratched through the paint, in a manner evoking Picasso and Braque. Along with figurative and abstract works, the 60s also saw Fantoni creating brutalist pieces with edgy, angular shapes. In later life, his work took a minimalist turn.
In 1970 Fantoni founded the International School of Ceramic Art, dedicated to teaching ceramic arts and experimentation, where he continued to work and teach until his death.
Maintaining great versatility throughout his career, Fantoni completed projects for public and private buildings, churches, schools, theaters, cinemas, and ships.
Marcello Fantoni died in Florence in 2011 at the age of 95.
His work is in several private collections and in numerous major museums. In the United States, his work is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, in New Hampshire in Manchester at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, among others. In the United Kingdom, his work is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art City Gallery in Manchester, and the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. His work is also in Japan at the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto (MoMAK) and the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. In Italy, his work is at the Museo Internazionale della Ceramica in Faenza (M.I.C.), the Museo Nazionale del Bargello and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi.
Biographical sources include ceramichefantoni.it, archiviyo, donzella
Oskar Fischinger To Oskar Fischinger, the potential of abstraction was infinite. As a visionary of abstract expression, Fischinger left an indelible mark in filmmaking history, and is considered one of the pioneers of non-objective animation and visual music.
Born on June 22, 1900, in Gelnhausen, Germany, Fischinger planned to pursue a career in engineering. In the early 1920s, he came into contact with Frankfurt’s avant-garde and soon discovered film’s potential to create a more spiritual, wholly abstract art built on models already established by such artists as Vasily Kandinsky. Fischinger’s early films, like his "Study (Studie)" series (1929–33), present amorphous forms choreographed to popular music. He supported his experimental film career with commercial work, most notably, by designing the special effects for German director Fritz Lang’s 1929 feature "Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond)."
His natural aptitude took him far in the filmmaking industry, bringing him and his family to Los Angeles, and earning him jobs at major studios including Paramount, M.G.M., and Disney. Fischinger also earned support from The Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded at film festivals internationally.
In the United States, he also applied his brilliant technical skill and proclivity for abstraction within a new medium: oil painting. The resulting body of work, spanning thirty years and totaling some eight hundred paintings, emerged as a prolific and strikingly diverse compendium of visual gestures.
Fischinger's explorations into the seemingly endless possibilities inherent in abstraction demonstrated his playfulness and evident pleasure in delving into one style after another. In these works, Fischinger ranged from mind-bending juxtapositions of layered lines and grids forming visual puzzles, to collections of finely detailed contours forming larger organically emotive works, followed by stark graphic compositions functioning as simplistic analyses of shape, to name a few.
Fischinger's paintings have received considerable acclaim in exhibitions throughout the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philips Collection, Washington D.C., and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His films and paintings are well represented in public and private collections internationally.
Born on June 22, 1900, in Gelnhausen, Germany, Fischinger planned to pursue a career in engineering. In the early 1920s, he came into contact with Frankfurt’s avant-garde and soon discovered film’s potential to create a more spiritual, wholly abstract art built on models already established by such artists as Vasily Kandinsky. Fischinger’s early films, like his "Study (Studie)" series (1929–33), present amorphous forms choreographed to popular music. He supported his experimental film career with commercial work, most notably, by designing the special effects for German director Fritz Lang’s 1929 feature "Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond)."
His natural aptitude took him far in the filmmaking industry, bringing him and his family to Los Angeles, and earning him jobs at major studios including Paramount, M.G.M., and Disney. Fischinger also earned support from The Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded at film festivals internationally.
In the United States, he also applied his brilliant technical skill and proclivity for abstraction within a new medium: oil painting. The resulting body of work, spanning thirty years and totaling some eight hundred paintings, emerged as a prolific and strikingly diverse compendium of visual gestures.
Fischinger's explorations into the seemingly endless possibilities inherent in abstraction demonstrated his playfulness and evident pleasure in delving into one style after another. In these works, Fischinger ranged from mind-bending juxtapositions of layered lines and grids forming visual puzzles, to collections of finely detailed contours forming larger organically emotive works, followed by stark graphic compositions functioning as simplistic analyses of shape, to name a few.
Fischinger's paintings have received considerable acclaim in exhibitions throughout the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philips Collection, Washington D.C., and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His films and paintings are well represented in public and private collections internationally.
Günther Förg Born in 1952 in Füssen, Germany (in the Allgäu region), Günther Förg was a prolific artist whose multidisciplinary output included experiments in abstraction and monochrome painting and ambitious, sustained investigations into new materials and philosophies.
Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work that includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and drawing - often in combination.
Förg's painterly formulations are a consideration of the medium itself, and are in dialogue with the heroes of contemporary painting – such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworksth Kelly and Blinky Palermo – and with the aesthetics of Bauhaus architecture. Förg manages to redirect the media he employs by painting picture surfaces like a house painter, by composing rooms like a worksman, by composing photographs a la Godard.
Förg studied from 1973 until 1979 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Karl Fred Dahmen. In these years, Förg developed a practice grounded almost exclusively in grey and black monochrome canvas pictures in acrylic. As he stated, ‘Grey is nothing: not white, not black. Something in between. Not concerned with the figure. Something free.’
Förg started using photography in his work at the beginning of the 1980s. His photographs of buildings with cultural and political significance — Bauhaus structures in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, for example, or Fascist ones in Italy — were taken from unusual, sharp-angled perspectives, with off-center framing and often in grainy focus, suggestive of painting. Many of the photographs are views taken through windows that draw attention to transitions from interior to exterior space.
For some years Förg pursued a purely photographic practice as a reaction against painting itself. He would later reflect that his use of photography was a method of ‘working closer to reality,’ stating, ‘what one paints is not reality.’
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his photographic works achieved critical acclaim and were exhibited at major museums internationally, including the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY. During this time, Förg also began experimenting with the exhibition space itself, painting over the gallery walls, and positioning photographs against his own paintings.
Förg entered a new phase of experimentation in the late 1980s, which brought him back to painting, but also included the embrace of new materials for him, such wood, copper, bronze, and lead. In the early 1980s, Förg made his so-called Alubilder – assemblages of aluminum sheeting onto which he had painted linear patterns or portrait photographs. For his series of paintings on lead, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, he wrapped lead sheets over wooden frames, then painted each surface with acrylic, creating pieces that blur the line between painting and sculpture.
By the 2000s, Förg shifted away from the formality of minimalism, incorporating a brighter palette and more expressive hand with a series of grid-like marks and intersecting colors. The ‘Gitterbilder’ (grid paintings)—command a similar freedom of form and sensuality that led to comparisons to Cy Twombly. The roots for these pieces, however, are to be found in an earlier series, the so-called "Fenster-Aquarelle" (window watercolors): the crossbar forms a grid for the space in the image, which provides the frame for a whole flow of paintings without limiting their free display and development.
Other works from this era portray vast canvases of negative space interrupted by colorful, gestural hatching and mark-making.
From 1992 until 1999, he taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. From 1999 onward he was a professor in Munich at his alma mater The Academy of Fine Arts. He had a home in Areuse, Switzerland, as well as in Freiburg. In 1993 he married artist Ika Huber.
Förg died on his 61st birthday on December 5, 2013 in Freiburg, Germany.
In the artist’s own words, ‘I think painting is a resilient practice; if you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now.’
His works are in collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, the Sammlung Haubrok and the Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Biographical sources include: Artnet, Hauser and Wirth, Galerie Max Hetzler, DeBrock Gallery, Schellmann Art
One-person exhibitions:
1982: Galerie Achim Kubinski, Stuttgart
1983: Galerie Max Hetzler, Stuttgart
1991: Kunsthalle Tübingen: Günther Förg, 10. August - 15. September 1991
2003: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2005: Max Dudler, Günther Förg, Architektur Galerie, Berlin
2006: Günther Förg – Raum und Fläche – Fotografien, Kunsthalle Bremen
2007: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
2007: Museum der Stadt Füssen, Füssen
2007: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2008: Günther Förg – BACK AND FORTH, Essl Museum – Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Wien, Katalog Essl Museum
2009: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
2010: Günther Förg – Wandmalerei und Fotografie, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg
2010: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2011: Günther Förg – Bilder, Wandmalereien und Fotografie 1987–2011, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
2014: Günther Förg., Museum Brandhorst, München
2016: FÖRG - Günther Förg aus der Sammlung Kopp München, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen
Important public collections:
Germany:
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Lenbachhaus, Munich
Daimler Contemporary, Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin
Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg
Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen
Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main
Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main
Städel, Frankfurt/Main
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe
Museum Kurhaus Kleve
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GfZK, Leipzig
Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Kunstraum Grässlin, St. Georgen
Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg
Austria:
Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg/Vienna
Canada:
AGO, Toronto
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The Netherlands:
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Switzerland:
Swiss Re, Zurich
United Kingdom:
Tate Modern, London
United States:
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
MOCA, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
Scandinavia:
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark
Biographical sources: Hauser and Wirth, Artnet
Universal concepts of form, mass, proportion, rhythm and structure constitute a common thread in his work that includes sculpture, painting, printmaking, photography, and drawing - often in combination.
Förg's painterly formulations are a consideration of the medium itself, and are in dialogue with the heroes of contemporary painting – such as Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworksth Kelly and Blinky Palermo – and with the aesthetics of Bauhaus architecture. Förg manages to redirect the media he employs by painting picture surfaces like a house painter, by composing rooms like a worksman, by composing photographs a la Godard.
Förg studied from 1973 until 1979 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with Karl Fred Dahmen. In these years, Förg developed a practice grounded almost exclusively in grey and black monochrome canvas pictures in acrylic. As he stated, ‘Grey is nothing: not white, not black. Something in between. Not concerned with the figure. Something free.’
Förg started using photography in his work at the beginning of the 1980s. His photographs of buildings with cultural and political significance — Bauhaus structures in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, for example, or Fascist ones in Italy — were taken from unusual, sharp-angled perspectives, with off-center framing and often in grainy focus, suggestive of painting. Many of the photographs are views taken through windows that draw attention to transitions from interior to exterior space.
For some years Förg pursued a purely photographic practice as a reaction against painting itself. He would later reflect that his use of photography was a method of ‘working closer to reality,’ stating, ‘what one paints is not reality.’
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, his photographic works achieved critical acclaim and were exhibited at major museums internationally, including the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY. During this time, Förg also began experimenting with the exhibition space itself, painting over the gallery walls, and positioning photographs against his own paintings.
Förg entered a new phase of experimentation in the late 1980s, which brought him back to painting, but also included the embrace of new materials for him, such wood, copper, bronze, and lead. In the early 1980s, Förg made his so-called Alubilder – assemblages of aluminum sheeting onto which he had painted linear patterns or portrait photographs. For his series of paintings on lead, dating from the 1980s and 1990s, he wrapped lead sheets over wooden frames, then painted each surface with acrylic, creating pieces that blur the line between painting and sculpture.
By the 2000s, Förg shifted away from the formality of minimalism, incorporating a brighter palette and more expressive hand with a series of grid-like marks and intersecting colors. The ‘Gitterbilder’ (grid paintings)—command a similar freedom of form and sensuality that led to comparisons to Cy Twombly. The roots for these pieces, however, are to be found in an earlier series, the so-called "Fenster-Aquarelle" (window watercolors): the crossbar forms a grid for the space in the image, which provides the frame for a whole flow of paintings without limiting their free display and development.
Other works from this era portray vast canvases of negative space interrupted by colorful, gestural hatching and mark-making.
From 1992 until 1999, he taught at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. From 1999 onward he was a professor in Munich at his alma mater The Academy of Fine Arts. He had a home in Areuse, Switzerland, as well as in Freiburg. In 1993 he married artist Ika Huber.
Förg died on his 61st birthday on December 5, 2013 in Freiburg, Germany.
In the artist’s own words, ‘I think painting is a resilient practice; if you look through the history of painting it doesn’t change so much and we always see it in the present. It is still now.’
His works are in collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, the Sammlung Haubrok and the Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin; the Kunstmuseum, Bonn; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Biographical sources include: Artnet, Hauser and Wirth, Galerie Max Hetzler, DeBrock Gallery, Schellmann Art
One-person exhibitions:
1982: Galerie Achim Kubinski, Stuttgart
1983: Galerie Max Hetzler, Stuttgart
1991: Kunsthalle Tübingen: Günther Förg, 10. August - 15. September 1991
2003: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2005: Max Dudler, Günther Förg, Architektur Galerie, Berlin
2006: Günther Förg – Raum und Fläche – Fotografien, Kunsthalle Bremen
2007: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
2007: Museum der Stadt Füssen, Füssen
2007: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2008: Günther Förg – BACK AND FORTH, Essl Museum – Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Wien, Katalog Essl Museum
2009: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
2010: Günther Förg – Wandmalerei und Fotografie, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg
2010: Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2011: Günther Förg – Bilder, Wandmalereien und Fotografie 1987–2011, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
2014: Günther Förg., Museum Brandhorst, München
2016: FÖRG - Günther Förg aus der Sammlung Kopp München, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen
Important public collections:
Germany:
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Lenbachhaus, Munich
Daimler Contemporary, Berlin
Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin
Sammlung Hoffmann, Berlin
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz
MKM Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst, Duisburg
Kunstpalais Erlangen, Erlangen
Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main
Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt am Main
Städel, Frankfurt/Main
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe
Museum Kurhaus Kleve
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst GfZK, Leipzig
Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Kunstraum Grässlin, St. Georgen
Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg
Austria:
Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg/Vienna
Canada:
AGO, Toronto
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
The Netherlands:
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Switzerland:
Swiss Re, Zurich
United Kingdom:
Tate Modern, London
United States:
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
MOCA, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
Scandinavia:
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark
Biographical sources: Hauser and Wirth, Artnet
Maurice Freedman Maurice Freedman was born in Massachusetts, lived in New York, and painted in Maine. His desire to become an artist developed early and in high school he took classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston until 1921. Freedman then enrolled at the Massachusetts Normal School of Art (Massachusetts College of Art) in 1922 where he also earned a scholarship to continue his studies. In 1926 he was enrolled at the Art Students League in There only a year, he believed diving into the art scene overseas would be a better use of his time and talent and he moved to France where he took classes at Calarossi’s and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, studying with Andre L’hote and Fernand Leger. Another year later and he was discovered and purchased for the Lambert Collection and upon return to the U.S. he would secure life-long gallery representation at Midtown Galleries in New York.
In his review of Freedman's 1982 retrospective at Midtown Galleries, John Russell of the New York Times wrote, "he learned from Andre L’hote and others in Paris how to handle rich and strong color without letting it get out of hand and how to give individuality to the objects of everyday. He has never lost that initial vigor of the hand or the driving curiosity as to what may come of it. There are paintings in this show that deserve to go straight into the history of American painting of this century."
Freedman's work is also in the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the Monhegan Museum, among others.
In his review of Freedman's 1982 retrospective at Midtown Galleries, John Russell of the New York Times wrote, "he learned from Andre L’hote and others in Paris how to handle rich and strong color without letting it get out of hand and how to give individuality to the objects of everyday. He has never lost that initial vigor of the hand or the driving curiosity as to what may come of it. There are paintings in this show that deserve to go straight into the history of American painting of this century."
Freedman's work is also in the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the Monhegan Museum, among others.
William Frej: Seasons of Ceremonies William Frej began his career as an architect and later served as an international development specialist, living in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan over a period of 27 years. Always with his camera at his side, he has been photographing indigenous people and their environments for over 40 years, documenting the changing lifestyles and architecture of many of the world’s unique and ancient cultures.
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
William and Anne Frej: Travels Across the Roof of the World William Frej began his career as an architect and later served as an international development specialist, living in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan over a period of 27 years. Always with his camera at his side, he has been photographing indigenous people and their environments for over 40 years, documenting the changing lifestyles and architecture of many of the world’s unique and ancient cultures.
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
William Frej: Maya Ruins Revisited William Frej has been photographing indigenous people for over 40 years, while living in Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Mexico, as well as other remote mountainous regions of Asia, documenting the changing lifestyles and architecture of many of the world’s unique cultures.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
William Frej: Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms William Frej began his career as an architect and later served as an international development specialist, living in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan over a period of 27 years. Always with his camera at his side, he has been photographing indigenous people and their environments for over 40 years, documenting the changing lifestyles and architecture of many of the world’s unique and ancient cultures.
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
The photography captures both the stunning high peaks and remote mountain ranges of Asia, as well as the living cultures and religious ceremonies in the faraway regions of the Great Himalayan Range, the Ghats of Varanasi, India, rituals in Guatemala and Mexico, and the stone monuments of Cambodia’s Khmer. Frej’s transcendent photography will transport the viewer to these places of mountain grandeur and still vibrant religious practice.
Frej and his wife Anne first visited Nepal in 1981 on a month-long trek around Manaslu, the eighth highest peak in the world. Inspired by the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in remote mountain villages, this trek led to a lifelong quest, documenting both the world’s highest peaks, as well as the resilient people living throughout the roof of the world.
They returned to Nepal in 1982, and in 1985, they took a two-year sabbatical walking to the base camps of the world’s highest peaks. Starting in the mountains of northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, the Frej’s walked over 3,000 miles on their personal pilgrimage through Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet. Throughout this sojourn, Asia’s highest peaks and their outposts of remote civilizations and religions provided a wealth of subject matter for photography, documenting peaks, people and ceremonies seen by only a few.
Their quest continued over next three decades, until the present, returning to the Himalayas many times, living in Central Asia and Afghanistan, and documenting not only mountains, but ancient religious ceremonies that still define a way of life for Asia’s Hindu, Bon and Buddhist peoples. Frej’s June of 2018 visit to the Indian Himalaya retraced the steps of India’s devout holy men, the Sadhus, to Gaumukh glacier, the source of the holy Ganges, and continued through Ladakh, visiting 24 remote monasteries and participating in ceremonies at Lamayuru and Hemis Monasteries.
Frej has also spent considerable time the past five years documenting both the religious rites of Mexico’s indigenous communities and the contemporary Maya, and the ancient cities their fore-bearers so skillfully created over a millennium ago. His images of Semana Santa, Dia de los Muertos and the Feast Day of San Ildefonso transport us to a place that imbues strong transformational power.
In 2014, his one-person photographic exhibition Enduring Cultures was featured at Galeria La Eskalera in Merida, Mexico. It included black and white and color photography from Afghanistan, Upper Mustang, Nepal, and San Agustin Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. His photography was featured in a major exhibition which opened June 2015 at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, titled Tradicion, Devocion Y Vida: 80 years of Black and White Photography in New Mexico and Mexico. His photography on Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico was exhibited October-December 2015 in a one-person show at Peters Projects Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A number of his photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in their exhibitions Chimayo: A Pilgrimage through Two Centuries and Mirror Mirror: Frida Kahlo Photographs, in 2017. He was selected to participate in an exhibition titled Faith in New Mexico at Editions One Gallery in Santa Fe.
Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has mounted several major exhibitions, including: The Maya, Photography by William Frej, 2016, of 32 large-scale, black and white photographs of Mexico’s remote, off-the-grid Mayan ruins; Ancient Kingdoms, Hidden Realms,2017, an exhibition highlighting the Mayan and Khmer kingdoms; Ritual of the Cora, 2019, documenting the Holy Week ceremonies of the Cora people in the Sierra del Nayarit, Mexico; Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler, 2020, a unique pairing of archival material with Frej’s current imagery of the same locations; Seasons of Ceremonies, 2021, chronicling religious rituals in Yucatán, Chiapas, and Oaxaca, Mexico and Rabinal, Guatemala; and Travels Across the Roof of the World, 2022, with his wife Anne Frej, chronicling a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of the Himalaya.
Frej’s photographs were also featured in one-person exhibitions, Nomads of Kyrgyzstan in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2008 and Himalayan Pilgrimage at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific in Warsaw, Poland in 1998. His photographic work Taninbar to Tibet was featured in a one-person show at the Duta Fine Arts Museum and Gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1991. Mr. Frej’s other exhibitions include the Tucson Art Center in 1972, The Eye Gallery in San Francisco in 1977, and the San Francisco Arts Festival in 1976 and 1977. His photographs of Peru received purchase awards from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Arts Festival in the 1970s.
His photographs of the Himalaya, India and Africa were featured in the Edwin Bernbaum book, Sacred Mountains of the World and his photographs of India’s Tilwara camel fair were highlighted in Adventure Travel Magazine. Mr. Frej’s photographic work is represented in numerous public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
He is represented by Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His book of black-and-white photographs, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery, 2020), has won sixteen awards. His second book, Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2021), has won thirteen awards including four “photography book of the year” awards and the Gold Medal Best Photography book for 2021 from Foreword Indies/Foreword Reviews.
www.williamfrejphotography.com
View the current catalog
William Frej: Rock Art of the Greater Southwest William Frej is an award-winning photographer and author who began his professional life as an architect. He later served for almost thirty years as a diplomat, living and working in Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan. He also has traveled extensively in the mountain regions of Nepal, India, Pakistan and in Central Asia, as well as throughout Mexico and Guatemala.
Since 1970, always with his camera at his side, he has photographed Indigenous people and their environments. Bill has produced four fine art photography books since 2020:
Maya Ruins Revisited : In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler;
Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico;
Travels Across The Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir, and
Blurred Boundaries: Perspectives on Rock Art of the Greater Southwest.
His books have won more than forty awards including eight “photography book of the year” awards and a Silver Medal for Travel Books from the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition in 2023.
Since 1970, always with his camera at his side, he has photographed Indigenous people and their environments. Bill has produced four fine art photography books since 2020:
Maya Ruins Revisited : In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler;
Seasons of Ceremonies: Rites and Rituals in Guatemala and Mexico;
Travels Across The Roof of the World: A Himalayan Memoir, and
Blurred Boundaries: Perspectives on Rock Art of the Greater Southwest.
His books have won more than forty awards including eight “photography book of the year” awards and a Silver Medal for Travel Books from the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition in 2023.
Johnny Friedlaender Born and educated in what is now Poland, Johnny Friedlaender was a young student of Otto Mueller and Carlo Mense at the Breslau Art Academy. From an early age Friedlaender worked primarily in lithography and etching.
Johnny Friedlaender spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he published multiple series of etchings, mentored younger artists, and became a member of the Salon de Mai. During his lifetime, Friedlaender exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Bremen Art Museum, and the Far Gallery in New York City. He is famously credited with pioneering aquatint etching.
Johnny Friedlaender spent most of his adult life in Paris, where he published multiple series of etchings, mentored younger artists, and became a member of the Salon de Mai. During his lifetime, Friedlaender exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Bremen Art Museum, and the Far Gallery in New York City. He is famously credited with pioneering aquatint etching.
Oronzo Vito Gasparo Oronzo Gasparo was born in Rutigliao, Italy in 1903 and died in New York in 1969. He was an avid dancer and claimed to have brought the Rhumba to New York. Oronzo Gasparo studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York City where he was profoundly influenced by his work under the American painter Preston Dickinson. In this early work Gasparo created a composition that interweaves the human body and machine elements. He filled in some areas with opaque gouache while allowing the white paper to remain exposed in other sections.
He spent some time working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression and exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Art Gallery, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other museums and collections.
Sources:
Butler Institute of American Art
Crocker Art Museum Store
Exhibitions:
Art Institute of Chicago
Carnegie Institute
Corcoran Gallery
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Pennsylvania Academy
Salons of America
Society of Independent Artists
Whitney Museum of American Art
He spent some time working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression and exhibited widely throughout his lifetime, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Art Gallery, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other museums and collections.
Sources:
Butler Institute of American Art
Crocker Art Museum Store
Exhibitions:
Art Institute of Chicago
Carnegie Institute
Corcoran Gallery
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Pennsylvania Academy
Salons of America
Society of Independent Artists
Whitney Museum of American Art
Lloyd Lozes Goff Lloyd Lozes Goff was born in Texas, but spilt his artistic career between New Mexico and New York. A member of the Art Students League and an WPA artist, he was a muralist as well as a Modernist painter. His works were exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the 1939 World's Fair in New York, San Francisco Art Association, the Museum of New Mexico, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
Michael Goldberg Michael Goldberg, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter known for his action-packed, gestural canvases, went through several phases that included monochromatic works of red and then black, bands of white on black, caligraphic images and bright bands of color hinting of architectural forms. Ever aligned with Abstract Expressionism which he described in 2001 as "still the primary visual challenge of our time", he later shrugged off the designation saying "labels come and go". (Glueck)
He was also an art educator who taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1961 to 1962; Yale University in 1967; and the University of Minnesota in 1968. He and his artist wife, Lynn Umlauf, both taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York city.
Goldberg was born in 1924 in the Bronx of New York City. His studies at the Art Students League, 1938-1942, were interrupted by World War II where he served as a paratrooper in North Africa and Burma, making eighty jumps behind Japanese lines.
Returning to New York, he studied with Jose de Creeft and Hans Hofmann, and Hoffman remained a strong influence. He was also influenced by Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky, but it was Willem de Kooning, and his use of fiery brush-work and explosive color, who would prove to be Goldberg's greatest influence. Beginning 1980, he spent five months of each year in Tuscany, Italy on an estate near Siena. In his studio there, he created many of his signature paintings done with oil sticks pressed directly onto canvas. He described these as quasi grids, "patchy squares of color intersected at random by strong diagonals." (Glueck)
Goldberg participated in the dealer Leo Castelli’s ground- breaking Ninth Street Show in 1951, which included works by Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell; “he seemed to embody the attitudes shared by the artists of that group,” said Richard Kalina of Goldberg (“Michael Goldberg 1924–2007.” Art in America, March 2008). Two years later Goldberg received his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1955, Goldberg befriended fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Bluhm, which proved to be a fateful meeting. In 1956, Bluhm brought art collector Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. to Goldberg’s studio, and Chrysler purchased 17 of his paintings. With new interest in his work, Goldberg caught the eye of art dealer Martha Jackson and was soon represented by her gallery.
He was also an art educator who taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1961 to 1962; Yale University in 1967; and the University of Minnesota in 1968. He and his artist wife, Lynn Umlauf, both taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York city.
Goldberg was born in 1924 in the Bronx of New York City. His studies at the Art Students League, 1938-1942, were interrupted by World War II where he served as a paratrooper in North Africa and Burma, making eighty jumps behind Japanese lines.
Returning to New York, he studied with Jose de Creeft and Hans Hofmann, and Hoffman remained a strong influence. He was also influenced by Roberto Matta and Arshile Gorky, but it was Willem de Kooning, and his use of fiery brush-work and explosive color, who would prove to be Goldberg's greatest influence. Beginning 1980, he spent five months of each year in Tuscany, Italy on an estate near Siena. In his studio there, he created many of his signature paintings done with oil sticks pressed directly onto canvas. He described these as quasi grids, "patchy squares of color intersected at random by strong diagonals." (Glueck)
Goldberg participated in the dealer Leo Castelli’s ground- breaking Ninth Street Show in 1951, which included works by Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell; “he seemed to embody the attitudes shared by the artists of that group,” said Richard Kalina of Goldberg (“Michael Goldberg 1924–2007.” Art in America, March 2008). Two years later Goldberg received his first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In 1955, Goldberg befriended fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Bluhm, which proved to be a fateful meeting. In 1956, Bluhm brought art collector Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. to Goldberg’s studio, and Chrysler purchased 17 of his paintings. With new interest in his work, Goldberg caught the eye of art dealer Martha Jackson and was soon represented by her gallery.
Darren Vigil Gray Darren Vigil Gray grew up among the mountains and mesas of Dulce, New Mexico on the Jicarilla Apache reservation. His father was the tribal chairman as well as a country western guitarist (performing in a band called the Apache Red Vests), rancher, and rodeo cowboy; his mother studied to be a coloratura soprano, and encouraged Gray and his brother to learn piano and drums. Music would always remain a part of his future, noting that "music and art are inextricably linked."
At age 15 he begged his mother to let him leave the reservation to attend Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and graduated in 1977. He was exposed to the work of Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon, the latter of whom became Gray's mentor, who provided the young artist with a lifelong mantra: “create your own mythology.” He went on to study art at the College of Santa Fe (1978- 1979) and the University of New Mexico (1985-1986).
Gray has always been a dedicated musician, with such keen drumming skills that he has been invited to perform across parts of the country and abroad. This affinity between the visual and the aural has deepened his understanding of both genres while introducing him to many of the most gifted musicians of our time. Some four decades ago, he managed to arrange a meeting with the famed guitarist, songwriter, and producer, Robbie Robertson, at a Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood. After sharing a few Coronas on a hot California day, they ventured to Gray’s powder-blue Toyota flatbed where he pulled out a few new paintings. Robertson was so impressed that he purchased one right there in the parking lot, and their lifelong friendship was born. Since then, his art has been highly prized by myriad guitarists, singers, and songwriters, many of whom have become not only collectors but devoted friends.
Gray has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe; Keyes Fine Arts, Sag Harbor, New York; Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe (including a 20 year retrospective in 2002); Orenda Art International, Paris, France; The Common Ground, New York, New York; and The Santa Fe Gallery, London, England, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Avery Fisher Hall, New York City, New York; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and the Musee de l'Homme, Paris, France.
Gray’s work is represented in the collections of numerous public and private institutions including the Denver Art Museum, CO; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Gilcrease Museum, OK; Bruce Museum, CT; Heard Museum, Phoenix,; The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe; National Museum of American Arts, Washington, D.C.; Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe; Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, New York; Museum of the American West, Sun Valley, Idaho; Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; Norman Mackenzie Museum, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan; and the Stamford Museum, Stamford, Connecticut, among others.
above source materials include personal interviews w/artist; Keyes Fine Arts, Sag Harbor, NY; others
At age 15 he begged his mother to let him leave the reservation to attend Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and graduated in 1977. He was exposed to the work of Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon, the latter of whom became Gray's mentor, who provided the young artist with a lifelong mantra: “create your own mythology.” He went on to study art at the College of Santa Fe (1978- 1979) and the University of New Mexico (1985-1986).
Gray has always been a dedicated musician, with such keen drumming skills that he has been invited to perform across parts of the country and abroad. This affinity between the visual and the aural has deepened his understanding of both genres while introducing him to many of the most gifted musicians of our time. Some four decades ago, he managed to arrange a meeting with the famed guitarist, songwriter, and producer, Robbie Robertson, at a Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood. After sharing a few Coronas on a hot California day, they ventured to Gray’s powder-blue Toyota flatbed where he pulled out a few new paintings. Robertson was so impressed that he purchased one right there in the parking lot, and their lifelong friendship was born. Since then, his art has been highly prized by myriad guitarists, singers, and songwriters, many of whom have become not only collectors but devoted friends.
Gray has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe; Keyes Fine Arts, Sag Harbor, New York; Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe (including a 20 year retrospective in 2002); Orenda Art International, Paris, France; The Common Ground, New York, New York; and The Santa Fe Gallery, London, England, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Avery Fisher Hall, New York City, New York; Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and the Musee de l'Homme, Paris, France.
Gray’s work is represented in the collections of numerous public and private institutions including the Denver Art Museum, CO; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Gilcrease Museum, OK; Bruce Museum, CT; Heard Museum, Phoenix,; The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe; National Museum of American Arts, Washington, D.C.; Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe; Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York, New York; Museum of the American West, Sun Valley, Idaho; Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; Norman Mackenzie Museum, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan; and the Stamford Museum, Stamford, Connecticut, among others.
above source materials include personal interviews w/artist; Keyes Fine Arts, Sag Harbor, NY; others
Elliott Green Elliott Green was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. He attended the University of Michigan, where he studied World literature and Art history. He moved to New York City in 1981 and has been making paintings ever since.
After spending a year in Rome in 2012, his work developed a new sense of space and landscape, characterized by panoramic, far-reaching vistas, and geophysical features like mountains, reservoirs and skies that seem to melt impossibly into pure gesture. In his recent work, the conventions of landscape are upended to produce a visual experience of equal parts gestural energy, emotion, memory, and metaphor.
The poet Jana Prikryl notes, “Elliott Green’s paintings appear to be in continuous motion, the way animals, plants, and ultimately rocks and mountains are in continuous motion, even when our human vision fails to apprehend it. Placing great thick gestures of paint amid minute intricacies and vice versa, his compositions demonstrate the movement of the universe on both the macro and the micro scales.”
Elliott Green has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Jules Guerin Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Residency, a The Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, a residency at the BAU Institute, Cassis, France, a MacDowell Colony Residency, and three residencies at Yaddo.
After spending a year in Rome in 2012, his work developed a new sense of space and landscape, characterized by panoramic, far-reaching vistas, and geophysical features like mountains, reservoirs and skies that seem to melt impossibly into pure gesture. In his recent work, the conventions of landscape are upended to produce a visual experience of equal parts gestural energy, emotion, memory, and metaphor.
The poet Jana Prikryl notes, “Elliott Green’s paintings appear to be in continuous motion, the way animals, plants, and ultimately rocks and mountains are in continuous motion, even when our human vision fails to apprehend it. Placing great thick gestures of paint amid minute intricacies and vice versa, his compositions demonstrate the movement of the universe on both the macro and the micro scales.”
Elliott Green has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Jules Guerin Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Residency, a The Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, a residency at the BAU Institute, Cassis, France, a MacDowell Colony Residency, and three residencies at Yaddo.
John Grillo “Abstract painting is on a level with music. It’s a physical outburst from your whole being. It’s not the idea that is created and then you start painting. It’s always a challenge to shape something from nothing, to do the impossible.” John Grillo, August, 2001.
John Grillo (1917 - 2014) was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, working alongside Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still from 1946 to 1947 at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) to found the movement also known as the New York School.
Grillo’s explosive drip paintings—projectile splatterings on cast-off objects as well as other more conventional supports—chronologically parallel those of Jackson Pollock, though he reserved his most radical experimentation for the media of gouache and watercolor, creating work that exudes a sensuous delight in the manipulation of paint in radiant, almost phosphorescent color.
John Grillo was born July 4, 1917, the elder of three sons to Sicilian immigrant parents, in the small industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. As a child his first influences were from within the family, since his father had painted and sculpted. The 1930s brought the family to Hartford, Connecticut, where John would frequent the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum , drawing inspiration from its portrait collection.
He began taking art courses at the Hartford Art School in Conneticut, where he became acquainted with modernist masterworks by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró at the nearby Wadsworth Atheneum. In 1937, he collaborated with Alexander Calder and Eugene Berman in the theatre production, “Paper Ball: Cirque des Chiffoniers” for the Hartford Arts Festival.
He painted the poor and the working class and in 1939 he painted a large mural depicting a family of three sitting at a dining table with no food on their plates (based possibly on a lithograph by Daumier). During this period his major interests included the “Ashcan School”, Luks, Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, together with the works of the old masters.
In 1944 Grillo enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Okinawa in the South Pacific where he continued to paint landscapes and scenes of life in the service. At that time he was inspired by a reproduction of Robert Motherwell’s collage, “Pancho Villa.” This soon led to his flowing and spontaneous abstractions, some of which were included in a post- war exhibition entitled “Soldier Art” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Grillo disembarked in San Francisco and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, a hotbed of experimental abstraction in America with a faculty and guest lecturers that included Elmer Bischoff, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Stanley William Hayter, Hassel Smith, David Park, Clyfford Still, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Ad Reinhardt.
Douglas MacAgy, the California School of Fine Arts director, remembered Grillo as that “fiery young sailor” and gave him a studio - and a lot of free reign. In Susan Landauer’s “John Grillo, the San Francisco Years: Art of California”, May 1990, she wrote: “Short on art supplies, Grillo used whatever was at hand. He threw cocoa and coffee grounds on sheets of paper to make speckled abstract patterns, tying the compositions together with washes and linear designs.”
Equally responsible for the school’s energized atmosphere were the veterans flooding the classrooms after the war, and Grillo epitomized this new breed of mature and independent-minded student on an equal footing with the instructors. Grillo’s free wheeling, unorthodox abstractions, begun while stationed on Okinawa, served as an important catalyst for many artists, notably faculty member Diebenkorn, who credited Grillo with liberating his style.
In the summer of 1947, he studied with Rothko and created a sizable amount of work. He was given his first one-man show at the Daliel Gallery in Berkeley and received the Samuel S. Bender Award for painting, the funds of which enabled him to continue painting at the school.
“Although he was only there for two short years, Grillo played a seminal role in the San Francisco branch of a movement that would revolutionize American Art. Today, Grillo is acknowledged as perhaps the first and purest ‘action painter’ on the West Coast and one of the most influential painters of San Francisco’s school of Abstract Expressionism” (Thomas Albright, “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area,” 1985.)
Toward the end of 1947, Grillo returned to the East Coast, where he was initially welcomed into New York’s avant-garde. Sam Hunter, reviewing his solo exhibition of San Francisco work at the Artist’s Gallery for the New York Times in 1948, singled Grillo out as a leading figure, writing: “His painting acknowledges no allegiance to tradition, exists in a moment of intensity of explosive abstraction.” He was also selected for the signal show 15 Unknowns at the Kootz Gallery in 1950. From 1948 to 1951, Grillo studied with Hans Hofmann, whose love of dazzling color matched his own. Though he became a favored student of Hofmann, who purchased one of Grillo’s paintings for his own collection, the connection may have ultimately hurt his career, positioning him as a second-generation Hofmann disciple.
However, Grillo was not a slavish copier - a trait that Hofmann appreciated.
“I would do the damnedest and be rebellious and go against his principles and I would just do my own thing,” Grillo said in a 1980s interview. “I was extremely shocked and quite pleased that he liked my work so much that I had buyers in some of the students that wanted to buy my painting. “
In the 1950s he experimented with symbolism, action painting and grid-like paintings consisting of small squares based on Hofmann’s teachings. During the early 1950s the Olsen Foundation acquired some of Grillo’s watercolors and paintings for a retrospective collection that traveled to museums and colleges throughout the United States. Works were also being acquired in this period by major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Grillo’s body of work remained consistent in reveling in high-keyed color and lush surfaces. Critic April Kingsley remembered of his “Yellow Abstractions” exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1961 that they “indulged his love of pigment for its own sake to the fullest. The canvases and huge collages . . . seem hedonistic and full of joy as the best of Hofmann’s and are even more sensuous.” Grillo’s paintings—whether figurative or abstract—have elicited adjectives such as Rubenesque and he has been called “the Renoir of Abstract Expressionism.”
One critic brought up Turner, while another waxed eloquently about Venetian luminosity. Exhibitions of these works appeared at the Howard Wise Gallery, Bertha Schaefer Gallery and the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York City.
During the mid-1960s, Grillo was artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ford Foundation Grant to produce lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1964. Returning to New York, he began working in three dimensions and produced fired clay and lost-wax pieces cast in bronze. Anthropomorphic in character, one of these works was acquired by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection.
In 1965, while spending the summer in a Maine farm house, Grillo painted on found objects such as bent wood chairs, antique Victrolas, headboards, farm implements, a sauerkraut maker, and his own easel and palette. He did a series of geometric etchings, paintings and silk screens from 1967-1971. During the 1970s he explored several series, including the “Kaleidoscape” set of abstract landscapes, and colorful figurative and erotic paintings and lithographs.
In 1967, Grillo was appointed Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught for 25 years. He served as an inspiration to his students, initiating participatory events such as mural projects in public places, thematic performances and arts carnivals, which later led to his “Circus Theme,” a series of paintings produced from 1981-83.
Having traveled to South America in the early 1980s, the mythology and religion of the Colombian Indians became the theme of paintings and charcoal drawings depicting Eldorado. He also created large- scale vibrant paintings based on the tango theme. “Grillo researched the origin of the dance from a form of social protest to a fashion of the times. He used the music of the dance to guide his art works” (Ellen Rubenstein, Cove Gallery, 1998). This theme was later revisited in 1998.
Uniquely, some of his circus and tango paintings were painted on both sides of the canvas and hung from the ceiling, to be viewed from both sides.
In 1991, Grillo moved to Wellfleet in Cape Cod, joining the close-knit art colony of the Provincetown area. He maintained a studio and continued to paint on a daily basis, reinventing and evolving his artwork.
In September, 2014 he had a retrospective exhibition, "John Grillo: Six Decades, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, 1945-2005" at the Herter Art Gallery at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
His work currently shows at galleries and museums in New York City, Cape Cod Mass., Boston, MA, Chicago, New Mexico and California.
Over the length of his career, he had over 85 one-man and 100 group shows. His paintings and sculptures are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the British Museum in London, among others.
Biographical sources: Jamieson Grillo; Susan Landauer
John Grillo (1917 - 2014) was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, working alongside Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still from 1946 to 1947 at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) to found the movement also known as the New York School.
Grillo’s explosive drip paintings—projectile splatterings on cast-off objects as well as other more conventional supports—chronologically parallel those of Jackson Pollock, though he reserved his most radical experimentation for the media of gouache and watercolor, creating work that exudes a sensuous delight in the manipulation of paint in radiant, almost phosphorescent color.
John Grillo was born July 4, 1917, the elder of three sons to Sicilian immigrant parents, in the small industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. As a child his first influences were from within the family, since his father had painted and sculpted. The 1930s brought the family to Hartford, Connecticut, where John would frequent the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum , drawing inspiration from its portrait collection.
He began taking art courses at the Hartford Art School in Conneticut, where he became acquainted with modernist masterworks by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró at the nearby Wadsworth Atheneum. In 1937, he collaborated with Alexander Calder and Eugene Berman in the theatre production, “Paper Ball: Cirque des Chiffoniers” for the Hartford Arts Festival.
He painted the poor and the working class and in 1939 he painted a large mural depicting a family of three sitting at a dining table with no food on their plates (based possibly on a lithograph by Daumier). During this period his major interests included the “Ashcan School”, Luks, Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, together with the works of the old masters.
In 1944 Grillo enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Okinawa in the South Pacific where he continued to paint landscapes and scenes of life in the service. At that time he was inspired by a reproduction of Robert Motherwell’s collage, “Pancho Villa.” This soon led to his flowing and spontaneous abstractions, some of which were included in a post- war exhibition entitled “Soldier Art” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Grillo disembarked in San Francisco and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, a hotbed of experimental abstraction in America with a faculty and guest lecturers that included Elmer Bischoff, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Stanley William Hayter, Hassel Smith, David Park, Clyfford Still, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Ad Reinhardt.
Douglas MacAgy, the California School of Fine Arts director, remembered Grillo as that “fiery young sailor” and gave him a studio - and a lot of free reign. In Susan Landauer’s “John Grillo, the San Francisco Years: Art of California”, May 1990, she wrote: “Short on art supplies, Grillo used whatever was at hand. He threw cocoa and coffee grounds on sheets of paper to make speckled abstract patterns, tying the compositions together with washes and linear designs.”
Equally responsible for the school’s energized atmosphere were the veterans flooding the classrooms after the war, and Grillo epitomized this new breed of mature and independent-minded student on an equal footing with the instructors. Grillo’s free wheeling, unorthodox abstractions, begun while stationed on Okinawa, served as an important catalyst for many artists, notably faculty member Diebenkorn, who credited Grillo with liberating his style.
In the summer of 1947, he studied with Rothko and created a sizable amount of work. He was given his first one-man show at the Daliel Gallery in Berkeley and received the Samuel S. Bender Award for painting, the funds of which enabled him to continue painting at the school.
“Although he was only there for two short years, Grillo played a seminal role in the San Francisco branch of a movement that would revolutionize American Art. Today, Grillo is acknowledged as perhaps the first and purest ‘action painter’ on the West Coast and one of the most influential painters of San Francisco’s school of Abstract Expressionism” (Thomas Albright, “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area,” 1985.)
Toward the end of 1947, Grillo returned to the East Coast, where he was initially welcomed into New York’s avant-garde. Sam Hunter, reviewing his solo exhibition of San Francisco work at the Artist’s Gallery for the New York Times in 1948, singled Grillo out as a leading figure, writing: “His painting acknowledges no allegiance to tradition, exists in a moment of intensity of explosive abstraction.” He was also selected for the signal show 15 Unknowns at the Kootz Gallery in 1950. From 1948 to 1951, Grillo studied with Hans Hofmann, whose love of dazzling color matched his own. Though he became a favored student of Hofmann, who purchased one of Grillo’s paintings for his own collection, the connection may have ultimately hurt his career, positioning him as a second-generation Hofmann disciple.
However, Grillo was not a slavish copier - a trait that Hofmann appreciated.
“I would do the damnedest and be rebellious and go against his principles and I would just do my own thing,” Grillo said in a 1980s interview. “I was extremely shocked and quite pleased that he liked my work so much that I had buyers in some of the students that wanted to buy my painting. “
In the 1950s he experimented with symbolism, action painting and grid-like paintings consisting of small squares based on Hofmann’s teachings. During the early 1950s the Olsen Foundation acquired some of Grillo’s watercolors and paintings for a retrospective collection that traveled to museums and colleges throughout the United States. Works were also being acquired in this period by major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Grillo’s body of work remained consistent in reveling in high-keyed color and lush surfaces. Critic April Kingsley remembered of his “Yellow Abstractions” exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1961 that they “indulged his love of pigment for its own sake to the fullest. The canvases and huge collages . . . seem hedonistic and full of joy as the best of Hofmann’s and are even more sensuous.” Grillo’s paintings—whether figurative or abstract—have elicited adjectives such as Rubenesque and he has been called “the Renoir of Abstract Expressionism.”
One critic brought up Turner, while another waxed eloquently about Venetian luminosity. Exhibitions of these works appeared at the Howard Wise Gallery, Bertha Schaefer Gallery and the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York City.
During the mid-1960s, Grillo was artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ford Foundation Grant to produce lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1964. Returning to New York, he began working in three dimensions and produced fired clay and lost-wax pieces cast in bronze. Anthropomorphic in character, one of these works was acquired by the Guggenheim Museum for its permanent collection.
In 1965, while spending the summer in a Maine farm house, Grillo painted on found objects such as bent wood chairs, antique Victrolas, headboards, farm implements, a sauerkraut maker, and his own easel and palette. He did a series of geometric etchings, paintings and silk screens from 1967-1971. During the 1970s he explored several series, including the “Kaleidoscape” set of abstract landscapes, and colorful figurative and erotic paintings and lithographs.
In 1967, Grillo was appointed Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught for 25 years. He served as an inspiration to his students, initiating participatory events such as mural projects in public places, thematic performances and arts carnivals, which later led to his “Circus Theme,” a series of paintings produced from 1981-83.
Having traveled to South America in the early 1980s, the mythology and religion of the Colombian Indians became the theme of paintings and charcoal drawings depicting Eldorado. He also created large- scale vibrant paintings based on the tango theme. “Grillo researched the origin of the dance from a form of social protest to a fashion of the times. He used the music of the dance to guide his art works” (Ellen Rubenstein, Cove Gallery, 1998). This theme was later revisited in 1998.
Uniquely, some of his circus and tango paintings were painted on both sides of the canvas and hung from the ceiling, to be viewed from both sides.
In 1991, Grillo moved to Wellfleet in Cape Cod, joining the close-knit art colony of the Provincetown area. He maintained a studio and continued to paint on a daily basis, reinventing and evolving his artwork.
In September, 2014 he had a retrospective exhibition, "John Grillo: Six Decades, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, 1945-2005" at the Herter Art Gallery at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
His work currently shows at galleries and museums in New York City, Cape Cod Mass., Boston, MA, Chicago, New Mexico and California.
Over the length of his career, he had over 85 one-man and 100 group shows. His paintings and sculptures are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the British Museum in London, among others.
Biographical sources: Jamieson Grillo; Susan Landauer
Hilaire Hiler Throughout his career, Hilaire Hiler was fascinated by color, design, and abstraction. His early work – from his time in Paris in the 1920's – was primitivistic and semi-abstract in style. In the 1930's, he experimented with Native American themes, though his work became increasingly abstract over time. By the 1940's, he was moving into the style of work for which he is best-known, a style which Hiler termed “Structuralism.” Hiler’s theory of Structuralism embodied a kind of “scientific analysis of color-form," as it was described by the art critic and theorist Waldemar George.
James Hilleary Born in 1924, James Hilleary was a native of Georgetown, Washington, D.C. Despite his vocation as a practicing architect he had a sixty-plus year career as an artist. He studied at the Catholic University of America in Washington, receiving his degree in 1950. Best known for his paintings in oil and acrylic, he produced an extensive body of works on paper as well as sculptures in plexiglass. Hilleary lived and worked in Bethesda, Maryland.
The influence of Hilleary’s father, who was both an amateur artist and musician, played a significant role in his early life and in his youth he gave serious thought to becoming a professional pianist. An interest in architecture eventually came to the fore but Hilleary’s education was interrupted by the advent of World War II and three years of service in the army. Following the war he returned to his architectural studies and eventually established his own practice. The possibility of a career as an artist was never a serious consideration.
Architecture and art are closely related disciplines and Hilleary never lost his early interest in drawing and painting. His father had studied painting with C. Law Watkins at the Phillips Collection and the art that Hilleary had been exposed to at that venerable institution left a lasting impression. Always interested in the artists of his day, Hilleary had aspirations to become a serious collector but lacked the finances to acquire work by the painters whose work he admired. Much in the manner of the academic model of an earlier era, he began to emulate their work in his own studio, steadily developing his confidence and technique. Hilleary’s efforts were rewarded when he realized that he had executed a painting of genuine originality. Inspired by this breakthrough he decided to dedicate himself to the development of his personal style.
Hilleary recalled that “Living in the suburbs and busy supporting a family, I was somewhat isolated from the city [Washington, D.C.] art scene and was completely unaware of the art school that Leonard Berkowitz and his first wife founded as a gathering place for emerging artists. I am sure that attending the school would have hastened by development.”
Dispiriting though such isolation may be, it likely worked to Hilleary’s eventual benefit. In 1960 his paintings came to the attention of Adelyn Breskin, Director of the Baltimore Art Museum, who pointed out that Hilleary’s independent development paralleled that of the group that became to be known as the Washington Color School. Following on the heels of the New York-based Abstract Expressionist movement, in the late 1950s the Washington Color School artists were beginning to dominate the local art scene and to gain significant national recognition. Hilleary began to make contact with various artists of the Color School, several of whom (Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring among them) were represented at the Henri Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1967 the gallery relocated to 21st Street in Washington, near the Phillips Collection, and Hilleary became the architect for the renovation of the building. He had his first solo exhibition at the Henri in 1968, thusly launching what Hilleary referred to “an unplanned and unexpected second career.”
Hilleary exhibited his work steadily after that time, and in 2003 a forty-year retrospective of his work was presented at the Edison Place Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Acknowledging the artist’s early musical aspirations, prominent art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of that exhibition, “Hilleary’s abstract paintings have their sophisticated place in its [“musical abstraction’s”] history. Indeed, they civilize the primitive musical painting with which 20th century abstraction began, making it harmonious with no loss of drama. Inner conflict is unresolved in Kandinsky’s visual music—from the beginning, abstract painting was an emotional breathing space in an everyday world which had none—but Hilleary’s visual music resolves it in the act of revealing it, which is why music is said to be healing.”
Kuspit later wrote in a 2013 exhibition review:
“From the beginning of his career - as Coptic,1966, Polaris, 1971, the Afterimage Series, 1974, and Portal Series, 1979 indicate - Hilleary was interested in patterns as well as colors—patterns not simply as decorative displays of color, but as an intricate arrangement of what the Futurists called lines of force. Thus he oscillates between the geometrical and atmospheric extremes of pure painting, integrating them in the act of acknowledging their difference.”
Hilleary's work is found in numerous museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires, and in numerous private collections around the world.
The influence of Hilleary’s father, who was both an amateur artist and musician, played a significant role in his early life and in his youth he gave serious thought to becoming a professional pianist. An interest in architecture eventually came to the fore but Hilleary’s education was interrupted by the advent of World War II and three years of service in the army. Following the war he returned to his architectural studies and eventually established his own practice. The possibility of a career as an artist was never a serious consideration.
Architecture and art are closely related disciplines and Hilleary never lost his early interest in drawing and painting. His father had studied painting with C. Law Watkins at the Phillips Collection and the art that Hilleary had been exposed to at that venerable institution left a lasting impression. Always interested in the artists of his day, Hilleary had aspirations to become a serious collector but lacked the finances to acquire work by the painters whose work he admired. Much in the manner of the academic model of an earlier era, he began to emulate their work in his own studio, steadily developing his confidence and technique. Hilleary’s efforts were rewarded when he realized that he had executed a painting of genuine originality. Inspired by this breakthrough he decided to dedicate himself to the development of his personal style.
Hilleary recalled that “Living in the suburbs and busy supporting a family, I was somewhat isolated from the city [Washington, D.C.] art scene and was completely unaware of the art school that Leonard Berkowitz and his first wife founded as a gathering place for emerging artists. I am sure that attending the school would have hastened by development.”
Dispiriting though such isolation may be, it likely worked to Hilleary’s eventual benefit. In 1960 his paintings came to the attention of Adelyn Breskin, Director of the Baltimore Art Museum, who pointed out that Hilleary’s independent development paralleled that of the group that became to be known as the Washington Color School. Following on the heels of the New York-based Abstract Expressionist movement, in the late 1950s the Washington Color School artists were beginning to dominate the local art scene and to gain significant national recognition. Hilleary began to make contact with various artists of the Color School, several of whom (Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, and Howard Mehring among them) were represented at the Henri Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia. In 1967 the gallery relocated to 21st Street in Washington, near the Phillips Collection, and Hilleary became the architect for the renovation of the building. He had his first solo exhibition at the Henri in 1968, thusly launching what Hilleary referred to “an unplanned and unexpected second career.”
Hilleary exhibited his work steadily after that time, and in 2003 a forty-year retrospective of his work was presented at the Edison Place Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Acknowledging the artist’s early musical aspirations, prominent art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of that exhibition, “Hilleary’s abstract paintings have their sophisticated place in its [“musical abstraction’s”] history. Indeed, they civilize the primitive musical painting with which 20th century abstraction began, making it harmonious with no loss of drama. Inner conflict is unresolved in Kandinsky’s visual music—from the beginning, abstract painting was an emotional breathing space in an everyday world which had none—but Hilleary’s visual music resolves it in the act of revealing it, which is why music is said to be healing.”
Kuspit later wrote in a 2013 exhibition review:
“From the beginning of his career - as Coptic,1966, Polaris, 1971, the Afterimage Series, 1974, and Portal Series, 1979 indicate - Hilleary was interested in patterns as well as colors—patterns not simply as decorative displays of color, but as an intricate arrangement of what the Futurists called lines of force. Thus he oscillates between the geometrical and atmospheric extremes of pure painting, integrating them in the act of acknowledging their difference.”
Hilleary's work is found in numerous museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires, and in numerous private collections around the world.
Charles Hinman Charles Hinman, known for his shaped-canvas sculpture, was born in Syracuse, New York on December 29, 1932. He attended art classes at Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now Everson Museum of Art) and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1955. He was a professional baseball pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves while pursuing his BFA. From 1955 to 1966, he studied at the Art Students League; then served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958.
Hinman lived in New York City and held various part-time jobs while he continued to paint. Charles Hinman taught painting and engineering drawing at Staten Island Academy, New York from 1960 to 1962, and was the shop instructor at Woodmere Academy on Long Island from 1962 to 1964. In these two positions, he developed carpentry and engineering skills that gave him the ability to construct his own shaped canvases with complex three-dimensional curves.
In 1963, while seeking an independent path, he created his first shaped canvases in his studio on the Bowery, where Will Insley, who was also working on shaped canvases, and Robert Indiana had studios, as well.
Hinman first received critical attention in the exhibition 7 New Artisits at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1964 where he exhibited flat canvases cut at angles and suspended by cords. The other artists in the exhibition were: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Norman Ives, Robert Slutsky, Robert Whitman, and Arakawa.
Hinman went on to add the third dimension to his shaped canvases while examining the subtle boundary between the picture plane and the space in front of it, as well as playing with the idea of literal versus illusionistic depth.
Usually Hinman begins his work by building charcoal drawings of volumetric shapes. Out of the series of drawings, he will select one drawing and turn it into “shop drawings” to determine how the organic shape can be turned into a constructed form with intricate shape stretchers supporting it. While building the armature, he addresses the level of three-dimensionality of the work. Once the work has been stretched with canvas and given a ground, he then determines colors, often creating more sketches and repainting areas several times.
In the 1960’s, Hinman used bright colors in his work adding an almost Pop aesthetic to his canvases, such as Poltergeist, 1964, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He said he was then using color as if he were painting a hot rod. In 1975, Hinman began an all-white series of paintings. Returning to color in the late 1970’s, Hinman treated color as spatial indicators with each color representing a different canvas unit; each color having a separate stretcher underneath it. With a more muted palette of grays, silvers, and tans, the artist attained subtle interactions of color shapes interlocking with each other in space within a rhythmic order.
Hinman’s first solo exhibition was at the Feigen Gallery in New York in Nov.-Dec.1964, quickly followed by exhibitions with Feigen in 1965 at both his New York and Chicago galleries. Out of the 1964 show, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Nelson Rockefeller purchased works. In 1965, Hinman was one of four Americans invited to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Nagaoka, Japan where Hinman shared first prize with the Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu. More solo and group exhibitions followed with Feigen through 1969 and then Hinman signed on with the Paris dealer Denise Rene, having solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1971 and then in her New York gallery in 1972, 1973 and 1975.
Hinman has visited Japan, Thailand, India, Iran, Greece, Italy, France and England. He served as artist-in-Residence, Aspen, Colorado in 1966. Hinman has taught at Cornell University and at Syracuse University. He has also held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the Cooper Union, Princeton University, University of Georgia campuses in Athens, Georgia and Cortona, Italy, and other distinguished institutions. Presently, he is teaching at the Art Students League of New York. In 1989, Hinman’s work traveled to Russia for an exhibition organized by Donald Kuspit titled Painting Beyond the Death of Painting at the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Hinman has credited Russian Supremacists as having a strong influence on his work.
Museum collections with Charles Hinman’s work include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Nagaoke Museum in Japan; the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel; and the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Germany, among others.
Hinman passed away May 2026 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Hinman lived in New York City and held various part-time jobs while he continued to paint. Charles Hinman taught painting and engineering drawing at Staten Island Academy, New York from 1960 to 1962, and was the shop instructor at Woodmere Academy on Long Island from 1962 to 1964. In these two positions, he developed carpentry and engineering skills that gave him the ability to construct his own shaped canvases with complex three-dimensional curves.
In 1963, while seeking an independent path, he created his first shaped canvases in his studio on the Bowery, where Will Insley, who was also working on shaped canvases, and Robert Indiana had studios, as well.
Hinman first received critical attention in the exhibition 7 New Artisits at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1964 where he exhibited flat canvases cut at angles and suspended by cords. The other artists in the exhibition were: Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Norman Ives, Robert Slutsky, Robert Whitman, and Arakawa.
Hinman went on to add the third dimension to his shaped canvases while examining the subtle boundary between the picture plane and the space in front of it, as well as playing with the idea of literal versus illusionistic depth.
Usually Hinman begins his work by building charcoal drawings of volumetric shapes. Out of the series of drawings, he will select one drawing and turn it into “shop drawings” to determine how the organic shape can be turned into a constructed form with intricate shape stretchers supporting it. While building the armature, he addresses the level of three-dimensionality of the work. Once the work has been stretched with canvas and given a ground, he then determines colors, often creating more sketches and repainting areas several times.
In the 1960’s, Hinman used bright colors in his work adding an almost Pop aesthetic to his canvases, such as Poltergeist, 1964, which is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He said he was then using color as if he were painting a hot rod. In 1975, Hinman began an all-white series of paintings. Returning to color in the late 1970’s, Hinman treated color as spatial indicators with each color representing a different canvas unit; each color having a separate stretcher underneath it. With a more muted palette of grays, silvers, and tans, the artist attained subtle interactions of color shapes interlocking with each other in space within a rhythmic order.
Hinman’s first solo exhibition was at the Feigen Gallery in New York in Nov.-Dec.1964, quickly followed by exhibitions with Feigen in 1965 at both his New York and Chicago galleries. Out of the 1964 show, the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Nelson Rockefeller purchased works. In 1965, Hinman was one of four Americans invited to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Nagaoka, Japan where Hinman shared first prize with the Japanese artist Jiro Takamatsu. More solo and group exhibitions followed with Feigen through 1969 and then Hinman signed on with the Paris dealer Denise Rene, having solo exhibitions at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1971 and then in her New York gallery in 1972, 1973 and 1975.
Hinman has visited Japan, Thailand, India, Iran, Greece, Italy, France and England. He served as artist-in-Residence, Aspen, Colorado in 1966. Hinman has taught at Cornell University and at Syracuse University. He has also held teaching positions at Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, the Cooper Union, Princeton University, University of Georgia campuses in Athens, Georgia and Cortona, Italy, and other distinguished institutions. Presently, he is teaching at the Art Students League of New York. In 1989, Hinman’s work traveled to Russia for an exhibition organized by Donald Kuspit titled Painting Beyond the Death of Painting at the Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Hinman has credited Russian Supremacists as having a strong influence on his work.
Museum collections with Charles Hinman’s work include: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Nagaoke Museum in Japan; the Louisiana Museum in Denmark; the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel; and the Pfalzgalerie Museum in Germany, among others.
Hinman passed away May 2026 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Margo Hoff Margo Hoff was born into a large family in Tulsa in 1910. As a child she spent many hours playing outside, finding patterns in nature, a practice she pursued throughout her life, rendering them as bright, textural paintings. Hoff graduated from Tulsa University in 1931. Three years later she moved to Chicago, enrolling in the National Academy of Art and later at SAIC. In 1939 she spent a few months in Europe traveling and looking at art, and during her lifetime she traveled and worked in over twenty-five countries, including Brazil, Ethiopia, and Lebanon.
Hoff's early paintings often featured a stylized figure in a flat, patterned, and sometimes skewed space, evoking a sense of mystery or a dreamlike quality. She included images of children, holidays, animals, and seashores, still emphasizing design and geometry. With the protagonist usually absorbed in an activity, the viewer was left to construct a narrative to accompany the scene. Hoff's content is largely autobiographical, constantly changing with her environs and activities.
The human figure remained an important component in her work until two pivotal moments encouraged an interest in abstraction: watching Sputnik I fly over the Earth (1957) and viewing an object through an electron microscope. Hoff became increasingly aware of the space surrounding the figures, rather than just the figures themselves. The human form eventually disappeared from her work, leaving abstract shapes of color in kaleidoscopic arrangements.
After moving to New York in the 1960s, Hoff began making collages of painted paper. In 1970 Hoff switched from paper to canvas collages, using vibrant colors to conjure up such sensations as the experience of a crowd, the rhythm of jazz, or the wail of night sirens. She also created lithographs, sculpture, stained- glass windows, wood block prints, and book illustrations. She has painted murals and designed tapestries and rugs, as well as stage sets and costumes.
Hoff showed in exhibitions at Art Institute Chicago (1945, 1946, 1950, and 1953), winning several prizes. In addition to her long-standing association with Fairweather-Hardin Gallery, which began in 1955 with her first one-person exhibition in Chicago, Hoff's work has been shown often in New York, including Hadler-Rodriguez Galleries, Saidenberg Gallery, Babcock Gallery, Betty Parsons Gallery, and Banter Gallery; and in Paris at Wildenstein Gallery.
Her work can be found in the collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Art Institute of Chicago.
"Margo Hoff: Paintings and Prints 1940-1990" 2025 Exhibition Catalogue
Hoff's early paintings often featured a stylized figure in a flat, patterned, and sometimes skewed space, evoking a sense of mystery or a dreamlike quality. She included images of children, holidays, animals, and seashores, still emphasizing design and geometry. With the protagonist usually absorbed in an activity, the viewer was left to construct a narrative to accompany the scene. Hoff's content is largely autobiographical, constantly changing with her environs and activities.
The human figure remained an important component in her work until two pivotal moments encouraged an interest in abstraction: watching Sputnik I fly over the Earth (1957) and viewing an object through an electron microscope. Hoff became increasingly aware of the space surrounding the figures, rather than just the figures themselves. The human form eventually disappeared from her work, leaving abstract shapes of color in kaleidoscopic arrangements.
After moving to New York in the 1960s, Hoff began making collages of painted paper. In 1970 Hoff switched from paper to canvas collages, using vibrant colors to conjure up such sensations as the experience of a crowd, the rhythm of jazz, or the wail of night sirens. She also created lithographs, sculpture, stained- glass windows, wood block prints, and book illustrations. She has painted murals and designed tapestries and rugs, as well as stage sets and costumes.
Hoff showed in exhibitions at Art Institute Chicago (1945, 1946, 1950, and 1953), winning several prizes. In addition to her long-standing association with Fairweather-Hardin Gallery, which began in 1955 with her first one-person exhibition in Chicago, Hoff's work has been shown often in New York, including Hadler-Rodriguez Galleries, Saidenberg Gallery, Babcock Gallery, Betty Parsons Gallery, and Banter Gallery; and in Paris at Wildenstein Gallery.
Her work can be found in the collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Art Institute of Chicago.
"Margo Hoff: Paintings and Prints 1940-1990" 2025 Exhibition Catalogue
Alexandre Hogue Alexandre Hogue was born on February 22, 1898 in Memphis, Missouri, to Reverend Charles Lehman Hogue and Mattie Hoover. Soon after, the Hogues moved to Denton, Texas, and later attended the Dallas-based Bryan Street High School in 1918. After a short year at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Hogue moved home to Dallas, where he was employed at the Dallas Morning News as an illustrator. In 1921, Hogue moved to New York City to work at various advertising firms with calligraphy assignments and to study in museums. He traveled back to Texas every summer while in New York to sketch with Charles Franklin Reaugh until he decided to plant himself in Texas in 1925 to paint. In 1931, he began teaching art classes at the Texas State College for Women and went on to become the head of the art department at Hockaday Junior College in 1936. In 1938, Hogue married and started a family with Maggie Joe Watson. During World War II, Hogue worked at North American Aviation. From 1945 to 1963, he became the head of the art department at the University of Tulsa. After his retirement from the University of Tulsa, the institution founded the Alexandre Hogue Gallery in his honor. Hogue remained in Tulsa until his death on July 22, 1994.
Martha Visser’t Hooft Martha Visser’t Hooft was an artist and teacher in the modernist tradition, best known for her abstract expressionist work, geometric-totemic abstractions, and surrealism. Her career spanned more than 60 years and she garnered critical acclaim with many awards and distinctions during the course of her long art career. She exhibited extensively in Buffalo, New York City and throughout the United States.
Martha for the most part was a self-taught artist. In 1922 she traveled to Europe to study the works of the emerging modernist painters at the Académie Julian, in Paris, as well as the music and avant-garde theater of the day. She moved to New York City three years later to further her studies at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, where she practiced set design for the theater there. She taught at the University of Buffalo from 1956-58, in Buffalo, NY. Her sister Mary Hamlin Goodwin, designer and patron of the arts, settled in Taos as a member of the Taos Art Colony. Visser’t Hooft visited her often, where she painted the surrounding landscape.
Martha for the most part was a self-taught artist. In 1922 she traveled to Europe to study the works of the emerging modernist painters at the Académie Julian, in Paris, as well as the music and avant-garde theater of the day. She moved to New York City three years later to further her studies at the Parson’s School of Applied Art, where she practiced set design for the theater there. She taught at the University of Buffalo from 1956-58, in Buffalo, NY. Her sister Mary Hamlin Goodwin, designer and patron of the arts, settled in Taos as a member of the Taos Art Colony. Visser’t Hooft visited her often, where she painted the surrounding landscape.
Ika Huber Ika Huber was born in Freiburg in 1953. She studied (1973-80) at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe, under Peter Dreher and Georg Baselitz. Since 1980 she has lived in Freiburg and Munich.
Huber's work as a painter and as a graphic artist is characterized by the relation between the clear, gestural quality of her brush and the overall composition of each image. Of particular significance are the glowing colours, applied very carefully in many layers and determining the character of the individual elements within each image. Huber evolves her motifs out of plant and floral forms, landscapes or buildings and interior spaces, and constructs these as sweeping lines and layers of colour that often intertwine or interweave. Within Huber's oeuvre, painting, prints and other works on paper retain an equal importance.
Huber's work as a painter and as a graphic artist is characterized by the relation between the clear, gestural quality of her brush and the overall composition of each image. Of particular significance are the glowing colours, applied very carefully in many layers and determining the character of the individual elements within each image. Huber evolves her motifs out of plant and floral forms, landscapes or buildings and interior spaces, and constructs these as sweeping lines and layers of colour that often intertwine or interweave. Within Huber's oeuvre, painting, prints and other works on paper retain an equal importance.
Kenneth Hudson Kenneth E. Hudson was Dean of the School of Art at Washington University from 1938 to 1969, and under his leadership, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree was first offered by the School of Art in 1941. Today, scholarships in his name are given to art students.
He was also a painter of richly colored abstract expressionist works and painted murals that are at the University of Oregon, and in Columbia, Missouri at the Municipal Building and Hendrix Hall. He studied at Ohio Wesleyan University and in 1927, earned a BFA from Yale University. From 1927 to 1929, he taught and was Chair of the School of Art at the University of Oregon.
He was also a painter of richly colored abstract expressionist works and painted murals that are at the University of Oregon, and in Columbia, Missouri at the Municipal Building and Hendrix Hall. He studied at Ohio Wesleyan University and in 1927, earned a BFA from Yale University. From 1927 to 1929, he taught and was Chair of the School of Art at the University of Oregon.
Scott Robert Hudson Education
B.A. California State University, Chico, 1986
Museum Collections
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
California State University, Chico Museum of Natural History
Center for Art+Environment Archive, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
I am an artist investigating the intersections of ecology, archeology, storytelling, memory and place. There are many experiences that formed me as an artist and three stand out in this moment. My sense of landscape was altered by five seasons as a wild-land firefighter. Second, is the two winters I spent as the studio assistant for the solar-kinetic sculptor Lowell Jones. Third, I spent three years as the artist in residence at the Vertebrate Museum at California State University, Chico where I produced watercolors of North American birds from study skins and sculpted models of nudibranchs and other mollusks.
These paintings at Peyton Wright are abstract but not non-object. The compositions were derived from specific socio-ecological sources, the petroglyphs at Grimes Point in Northern Nevada and the geo-glyphs at the Blythe Intaglios near the Colorado River in Southern California. It is my intent to reconfigure the geometry of the prehistoric forms to craft a new vocabulary of contemporary symbols. The Blythe paintings include an additional experiment. I have synthesized the ancient geo-glyphs with the traverse maps of the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The traverse maps seem so pictographic to me. By synthesizing these elements. I want to intuit and imply a span of time and geographic space. However, it was important to me that these paintings retained a primary abstract nature. I did not want the paintings to depict something but to become something.
B.A. California State University, Chico, 1986
Museum Collections
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
California State University, Chico Museum of Natural History
Center for Art+Environment Archive, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
I am an artist investigating the intersections of ecology, archeology, storytelling, memory and place. There are many experiences that formed me as an artist and three stand out in this moment. My sense of landscape was altered by five seasons as a wild-land firefighter. Second, is the two winters I spent as the studio assistant for the solar-kinetic sculptor Lowell Jones. Third, I spent three years as the artist in residence at the Vertebrate Museum at California State University, Chico where I produced watercolors of North American birds from study skins and sculpted models of nudibranchs and other mollusks.
These paintings at Peyton Wright are abstract but not non-object. The compositions were derived from specific socio-ecological sources, the petroglyphs at Grimes Point in Northern Nevada and the geo-glyphs at the Blythe Intaglios near the Colorado River in Southern California. It is my intent to reconfigure the geometry of the prehistoric forms to craft a new vocabulary of contemporary symbols. The Blythe paintings include an additional experiment. I have synthesized the ancient geo-glyphs with the traverse maps of the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The traverse maps seem so pictographic to me. By synthesizing these elements. I want to intuit and imply a span of time and geographic space. However, it was important to me that these paintings retained a primary abstract nature. I did not want the paintings to depict something but to become something.
Lucero Isaac Lucero Isaac is a Mexican postwar and contemporary set designer, dancer, film art director and plastic artist, who was born in 1936.
Born in Mexico City, Isaac began her professional life as a dancer.
In 1964 she began her career as an art director for film and theater with the production and direction of her husband Alberto Isaac, with a story by Gabriel García Márquez (“In this Town There Are No Thieves”).
From 1964 to the late 1980s, she worked as an art director and production designer in film. Her responsibilities included everything from sets to costumes and make-up; often she was called upon to produce the texture and feeling of past eras by recreating objects and details specific to a particular time and place.
As an art director she worked on films directed by Isaac, Arturo Ripstein, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Juan Manuel Torres, Claudio Isaac, Sergio Olhovich, Juan Luis Buñuel, Maurice Ronet, Juan López Moctezuma, Miguel Littin, Rafael Castanedo, Felipe Cazals, Juan García, Pedro Torres, and Costa Gavras. She created costume designs for Diana Bracho, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Max Von Sydow, Peter O´Toole, Jorge Luke, Helena Rojo, and María Rojo, among others, and won Academy Award nominations for her work.
At the end of 1987, disillusioned by poor scripts and dwindling budgets, she left film to devote herself full-time to sculpture; her boxes and assemblages are a natural development from her earlier work as a set designer.
Within a year, Isaac held her first exhibition (at the Galería Honfleur in Mexico City). A series of one-person exhibitions followed in rapid succession: "Letters That Never Arrived and Other Things" (1989), "Night Peoples’ Theater" and Night People’s Theater II" (1991 and 1992), and "Forsaken Dreams" (1994). Her work quickly attracted an international audience and has been included in a number of major exhibitions, among them "Women in Mexico," organized by the National Academy of Design in New York and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1990-91) (which also travelled to the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City), The Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia (1992) , and "Latin America and Surrealism" (1993) at the Museum of Bochum, Germany.
Isaac often mingles personal mementos –a piece of jewelry, a love letter– with historical artifacts; the result is a frisson of recognition as we confront the: relics of lives unknown, but nevertheless startlingly familiar. The preciosity, even pomposity of objects endowed with public and historical significance becomes an occasion for gentle satire in Pomp and Cire Perdue. Here a melange of political and military "medals" and ribbons fashioned from cigar rings, the tops of enameled tea tins, and the insignia of champagne bottles and corks,creates a witty send-up of those ubiquitous bronze public monuments and memorials created using the so-called "lost wax" technique.
Isaac has always been interested in the intuitive sparks that fly between kindred souls. She credits her son Claudio, who has worked as a writer, painter, and film director, with having been her greatest influence. There has existed between them a rich exchange of images and ideas, a mirroring of the creative process, which often extends to his supplying titles for her works. With Claudio, as with Marquez, Carrington, and the other artists, writers, and filmakers with whom she has shared her creative life, Isaac has set about teasing the Marvelous out of everyday reality.
Sources include : Whitney Chadwick , “Latin American Art”, San Francisco, July 1994
Born in Mexico City, Isaac began her professional life as a dancer.
In 1964 she began her career as an art director for film and theater with the production and direction of her husband Alberto Isaac, with a story by Gabriel García Márquez (“In this Town There Are No Thieves”).
From 1964 to the late 1980s, she worked as an art director and production designer in film. Her responsibilities included everything from sets to costumes and make-up; often she was called upon to produce the texture and feeling of past eras by recreating objects and details specific to a particular time and place.
As an art director she worked on films directed by Isaac, Arturo Ripstein, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Juan Manuel Torres, Claudio Isaac, Sergio Olhovich, Juan Luis Buñuel, Maurice Ronet, Juan López Moctezuma, Miguel Littin, Rafael Castanedo, Felipe Cazals, Juan García, Pedro Torres, and Costa Gavras. She created costume designs for Diana Bracho, Charlotte Rampling, Geraldine Chaplin, Max Von Sydow, Peter O´Toole, Jorge Luke, Helena Rojo, and María Rojo, among others, and won Academy Award nominations for her work.
At the end of 1987, disillusioned by poor scripts and dwindling budgets, she left film to devote herself full-time to sculpture; her boxes and assemblages are a natural development from her earlier work as a set designer.
Within a year, Isaac held her first exhibition (at the Galería Honfleur in Mexico City). A series of one-person exhibitions followed in rapid succession: "Letters That Never Arrived and Other Things" (1989), "Night Peoples’ Theater" and Night People’s Theater II" (1991 and 1992), and "Forsaken Dreams" (1994). Her work quickly attracted an international audience and has been included in a number of major exhibitions, among them "Women in Mexico," organized by the National Academy of Design in New York and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1990-91) (which also travelled to the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City), The Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia (1992) , and "Latin America and Surrealism" (1993) at the Museum of Bochum, Germany.
Isaac often mingles personal mementos –a piece of jewelry, a love letter– with historical artifacts; the result is a frisson of recognition as we confront the: relics of lives unknown, but nevertheless startlingly familiar. The preciosity, even pomposity of objects endowed with public and historical significance becomes an occasion for gentle satire in Pomp and Cire Perdue. Here a melange of political and military "medals" and ribbons fashioned from cigar rings, the tops of enameled tea tins, and the insignia of champagne bottles and corks,creates a witty send-up of those ubiquitous bronze public monuments and memorials created using the so-called "lost wax" technique.
Isaac has always been interested in the intuitive sparks that fly between kindred souls. She credits her son Claudio, who has worked as a writer, painter, and film director, with having been her greatest influence. There has existed between them a rich exchange of images and ideas, a mirroring of the creative process, which often extends to his supplying titles for her works. With Claudio, as with Marquez, Carrington, and the other artists, writers, and filmakers with whom she has shared her creative life, Isaac has set about teasing the Marvelous out of everyday reality.
Sources include : Whitney Chadwick , “Latin American Art”, San Francisco, July 1994
Daniel LaRue Johnson “Color talks of power, sex, lust and life. A motivating spirit that makes my mind see changing patterns of color is the music of Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis.” - Daniel Larue Johnson
Born in Los Angeles, African American painter, sculptor, printmaker Daniel LaRue Johnson (1938-2017) studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts)and in Paris with Alberto Giacometti. He was closely associated with Los Angeles’s African American artist movement of the mid-20th century, which developed as a response to the country’s social, political, and economic changes. His varied body of work includes politically charged collages as well as meticulously rendered color abstractions.
Throughout the early 1960s Johnson and his wife, artist Virginia Jaramillo, traveled extensively, often spending long periods of time in New York. In 1964, Johnson was invited by John Weber to participate in “Boxes,” an exhibition at Dwan Gallery. In the show, he presented works from his “Black Box” series, assemblages of objects painted black that addressed America’s civil rights movement. One such work, titled Yesterday, an open-faced box containing a section of the American flag besides a headless doll, comments on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
After graduating in 1965, Johnson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship that allowed the couple to live in Paris for a time. Upon their return, they settled permanently in New York, and the move marks a shift in Johnson's work. The visually arresting and emotive constructions gave way to a more painterly sculptural practice that played up vibrant colors with glossy surfaces. Very different from the black boxes, these works, for many, seemed more aligned with the slick, hard-edge, cool aesthetic then associated with Los Angeles. He also worked on a series of public commissions, including the 50-foot "Peace Form One," which commemorates Ralph Johnson Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Previously, Johnson created the largest Corten steel sculpture in the world, "Freedom Form #2." Dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., the work was installed in a park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1970.
Noting Johnson's relationship to Los Angeles and the other artists with whom he attended Chouinard, artist-critic Frank Bowling described his friend's sculpture "The Boy Wonder Dejohnette" (1969) as a "tulip trip through chrome-plated graveyards of California vulgarity."In other ways, Johnson's sculptures from the late 1960s into the 1970s reflect what he had always strived for in his work: utmost craftsmanship.
Writing about his sculptures, art critic Margit Rowell said:
"Specific to his generation is the concept of art as a multi-sensory experience: not just visual but acoustic; a multi-dimensional experience involving space as well as time; the eyes, the mind, and the body.... Like jazz [Johnson's work] it contains the paradoxes of the popular and the refined, the spiritual and the visceral, channeling a rich, raw and unsophisticated vernacular of feeling into a strict formal pattern, thus relating an intuitive improvisation to a traditional structural logic. The effect, immediate and imperative as well as joyful and relaxed, is an optimistic prelude to the new decade of the seventies."
In 1971, his work was included in the historically significant "DeLuxe Show", which was one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States – supported by the Menil family, also including artists such as Al Loving, Sam Gilliam, Virginia Jaramillo, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. That same year, Johnson withdrew his work from the Whitney Museum’s show “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” in solidarity with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the group of African American artists who initiated the exhibition. The boycotting artists claimed that the institution reneged on its promise to consult with African American arts specialists before selecting works for the show and to stage it during “the most prestigious period of the 1970–71 season.”
In 2011 Johnson's work was featured prominently in the exhibition "Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980." In a review of the exhibition the critic Christopher Knight noted “Daniel LaRue Johnson merged painting with assemblage, affixing fragments of a broken doll, a hacksaw, a mousetrap and rubber hose onto a large, black field of viscous, tar-like pitch. Made in the aftermath of Bull Connor's notorious Birmingham assault on peaceful civil rights marchers, Johnson injected a jolt of black social consciousness into the exalted status abstract artists then afforded to all-black paintings.”
In 2017, Johnson’s work was featured in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London, UK) which toured to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR, USA); Brooklyn Museum (NY, USA); the Broad (CA, USA) and de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (CA, USA). Johnson’s work is in many prestigious public collections, including: Museum of Modern Art (NY, USA); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY, USA); California African American Museum (CA, USA); and the Guggenheim Museum (NY, USA).
Additional biographical material from Artforum
Born in Los Angeles, African American painter, sculptor, printmaker Daniel LaRue Johnson (1938-2017) studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts)and in Paris with Alberto Giacometti. He was closely associated with Los Angeles’s African American artist movement of the mid-20th century, which developed as a response to the country’s social, political, and economic changes. His varied body of work includes politically charged collages as well as meticulously rendered color abstractions.
Throughout the early 1960s Johnson and his wife, artist Virginia Jaramillo, traveled extensively, often spending long periods of time in New York. In 1964, Johnson was invited by John Weber to participate in “Boxes,” an exhibition at Dwan Gallery. In the show, he presented works from his “Black Box” series, assemblages of objects painted black that addressed America’s civil rights movement. One such work, titled Yesterday, an open-faced box containing a section of the American flag besides a headless doll, comments on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
After graduating in 1965, Johnson received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship that allowed the couple to live in Paris for a time. Upon their return, they settled permanently in New York, and the move marks a shift in Johnson's work. The visually arresting and emotive constructions gave way to a more painterly sculptural practice that played up vibrant colors with glossy surfaces. Very different from the black boxes, these works, for many, seemed more aligned with the slick, hard-edge, cool aesthetic then associated with Los Angeles. He also worked on a series of public commissions, including the 50-foot "Peace Form One," which commemorates Ralph Johnson Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. Previously, Johnson created the largest Corten steel sculpture in the world, "Freedom Form #2." Dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., the work was installed in a park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1970.
Noting Johnson's relationship to Los Angeles and the other artists with whom he attended Chouinard, artist-critic Frank Bowling described his friend's sculpture "The Boy Wonder Dejohnette" (1969) as a "tulip trip through chrome-plated graveyards of California vulgarity."In other ways, Johnson's sculptures from the late 1960s into the 1970s reflect what he had always strived for in his work: utmost craftsmanship.
Writing about his sculptures, art critic Margit Rowell said:
"Specific to his generation is the concept of art as a multi-sensory experience: not just visual but acoustic; a multi-dimensional experience involving space as well as time; the eyes, the mind, and the body.... Like jazz [Johnson's work] it contains the paradoxes of the popular and the refined, the spiritual and the visceral, channeling a rich, raw and unsophisticated vernacular of feeling into a strict formal pattern, thus relating an intuitive improvisation to a traditional structural logic. The effect, immediate and imperative as well as joyful and relaxed, is an optimistic prelude to the new decade of the seventies."
In 1971, his work was included in the historically significant "DeLuxe Show", which was one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in the United States – supported by the Menil family, also including artists such as Al Loving, Sam Gilliam, Virginia Jaramillo, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. That same year, Johnson withdrew his work from the Whitney Museum’s show “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” in solidarity with the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, the group of African American artists who initiated the exhibition. The boycotting artists claimed that the institution reneged on its promise to consult with African American arts specialists before selecting works for the show and to stage it during “the most prestigious period of the 1970–71 season.”
In 2011 Johnson's work was featured prominently in the exhibition "Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980." In a review of the exhibition the critic Christopher Knight noted “Daniel LaRue Johnson merged painting with assemblage, affixing fragments of a broken doll, a hacksaw, a mousetrap and rubber hose onto a large, black field of viscous, tar-like pitch. Made in the aftermath of Bull Connor's notorious Birmingham assault on peaceful civil rights marchers, Johnson injected a jolt of black social consciousness into the exalted status abstract artists then afforded to all-black paintings.”
In 2017, Johnson’s work was featured in Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London, UK) which toured to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR, USA); Brooklyn Museum (NY, USA); the Broad (CA, USA) and de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (CA, USA). Johnson’s work is in many prestigious public collections, including: Museum of Modern Art (NY, USA); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY, USA); California African American Museum (CA, USA); and the Guggenheim Museum (NY, USA).
Additional biographical material from Artforum
Don Joint Don Joint is an American artist and curator who lives and works in New York City. His work consists of collage, assemblage, painting, works on paper, and photography.
Joint studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Chautauqua Institution.
Joint's work has been shown internationally in solo exhibitions at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NY; Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD; [FRED [London], England; Galerie Marion Meyer, Paris, France; Price Street Gallery, New York, NY.
His work has been included extensively in two-person and group shows in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe, including the Dr. M.T. Geoffrey Art Gallery, St John's University, Queens, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; McClain Gallery, Houston, TX; The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; The Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY; FRED [London]; Zoller Gallery, Penn State University, State College, PA; and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY.
His work has been reviewed in the New York Times,[1] Art in America,[2] ARTnews and The New York Sun[3] among others, and has been written about by Susanna Coffey, Grace Glueck, Mario Naves[4] and Edward Leffingwell.[5]
Don Joint is represented in New York by Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and his collage work is represented in New York by Pavel Zoubok Gallery.
Joint studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Chautauqua Institution.
Joint's work has been shown internationally in solo exhibitions at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NY; Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD; [FRED [London], England; Galerie Marion Meyer, Paris, France; Price Street Gallery, New York, NY.
His work has been included extensively in two-person and group shows in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe, including the Dr. M.T. Geoffrey Art Gallery, St John's University, Queens, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; McClain Gallery, Houston, TX; The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA; The Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY; FRED [London]; Zoller Gallery, Penn State University, State College, PA; and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY.
His work has been reviewed in the New York Times,[1] Art in America,[2] ARTnews and The New York Sun[3] among others, and has been written about by Susanna Coffey, Grace Glueck, Mario Naves[4] and Edward Leffingwell.[5]
Don Joint is represented in New York by Francis M. Naumann Fine Art and his collage work is represented in New York by Pavel Zoubok Gallery.
Raymond Jonson Born in Lucas County, Iowa, in 1891, Raymond Jonson received his early education in Portland, Oregon, where he was the first student to enroll at the Portland Museum Art School when it opened in 1909. In 1910, Jonson moved to Chicago to begin his formal art education at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. There, he studied under B.J.O. Nordfeldt, whose work and teaching had a profound effect on Jonson’s artistic and intellectual development. He went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Though Jonson moved to Chicago with the intention to pursue art commercially, he soon renounced commercial endeavors and devoted himself fully to the spiritual and philosophical possibilities of artistic expression. When the 1913 Armory Show came to Chicago, Jonson was fascinated with the new trends and ideas in modern art that he saw exhibited there. His interest in modernism was further heightened by his discovery of Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony in 1921.
After leaving the Art Institute, Jonson worked for several years at the Chicago Little Theater as a set and lighting designer. He spent two summers, in 1919 and 1920, at the MacDowell Art colony. In 1922, he paid his first extended visit to Santa Fe where, like so many of his modernist colleagues, he was profoundly influenced by the shapes and colors of the Southwestern desert landscape. He settled in Santa Fe permanently in 1924. Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, Jonson exhibited regularly in New York and Chicago. In 1934, he began teaching at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until 1954.
Throughout his life, Jonson was a powerful force for the development of modernism in the Southwest. According to Ed Garman, Jonson was never simply interested in his own work, but was always devoted to the development and preservation of art as a benefit to the entire community of his friends, colleagues, and students. At the University, he taught and influenced such prominent artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Agnes Martin.
In 1938, along with Emil Bisttram, he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. Jonson was also constantly devoted to exhibiting modern work and sharing it with the community. From 1927-1931, Jonson oversaw the creation of a “Modern Wing” at the Museum of New Mexico. In 1950, he founded the Jonson Gallery at UNM – the only space in the southwest where abstract and non-representational work was being exhibited at that time. There, Jonson was able to support the careers of many young modern artists by providing them with a space for the first exhibitions.
Though Jonson did not begin his career as an abstract artist, he was always fascinated as much by the expressive possibilities of painting as by the representation of material reality. The majority of Jonson’s work throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s is influenced in some way by notions of composition, and combinations of colors than with the physical world. These works are a kind of ‘exaltation of landscapes’ (Garman 1976; 66) in which the natural world is infused with order and rhythmic unity.
In the late 1920s, Jonson began to turn entirely to abstraction. After this point, Jonson’s goal was to create ‘pure abstractions’, in which his final paintings retain ‘no items of detail or fact taken from the physical components of the ‘inspiration” of the work (Ibid; 76). In this way, he could be free of the constraints of subject matter and focus purely on the expressive possibilities of composition and color. To Jonson, the ultimate goal of painting, which he pursued throughout his career with rigorous, single-minded devotion, was to portray the sacred rather than the earthly. ‘Jonson did not believe the sacred to be ‘beyond all reach’ nor did he believe it to be ‘the hopeless quest.’ He believed that art is precisely the vehicle by which is expressed the otherwise inexpressible’ (Ibid; 106).
In 1938, Jonson’s work was profoundly impacted by his adoption of the airbrush. With the airbrush, Jonson found that he could create uniformity of surface, transparency of shapes, and smooth and subtle variations of color that had never been possible before. With the widespread availability of acrylic polymer paints in 1957, Jonson was able to free himself almost completely from technical considerations and devote himself whole-heartedly to the configurations of colors and shapes for which his later work is best known.
Jonson exhibited throughout his career in Chicago, New York, and New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of New Mexico.
Though Jonson moved to Chicago with the intention to pursue art commercially, he soon renounced commercial endeavors and devoted himself fully to the spiritual and philosophical possibilities of artistic expression. When the 1913 Armory Show came to Chicago, Jonson was fascinated with the new trends and ideas in modern art that he saw exhibited there. His interest in modernism was further heightened by his discovery of Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony in 1921.
After leaving the Art Institute, Jonson worked for several years at the Chicago Little Theater as a set and lighting designer. He spent two summers, in 1919 and 1920, at the MacDowell Art colony. In 1922, he paid his first extended visit to Santa Fe where, like so many of his modernist colleagues, he was profoundly influenced by the shapes and colors of the Southwestern desert landscape. He settled in Santa Fe permanently in 1924. Throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s, Jonson exhibited regularly in New York and Chicago. In 1934, he began teaching at the University of New Mexico, where he remained until 1954.
Throughout his life, Jonson was a powerful force for the development of modernism in the Southwest. According to Ed Garman, Jonson was never simply interested in his own work, but was always devoted to the development and preservation of art as a benefit to the entire community of his friends, colleagues, and students. At the University, he taught and influenced such prominent artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Agnes Martin.
In 1938, along with Emil Bisttram, he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. Jonson was also constantly devoted to exhibiting modern work and sharing it with the community. From 1927-1931, Jonson oversaw the creation of a “Modern Wing” at the Museum of New Mexico. In 1950, he founded the Jonson Gallery at UNM – the only space in the southwest where abstract and non-representational work was being exhibited at that time. There, Jonson was able to support the careers of many young modern artists by providing them with a space for the first exhibitions.
Though Jonson did not begin his career as an abstract artist, he was always fascinated as much by the expressive possibilities of painting as by the representation of material reality. The majority of Jonson’s work throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s is influenced in some way by notions of composition, and combinations of colors than with the physical world. These works are a kind of ‘exaltation of landscapes’ (Garman 1976; 66) in which the natural world is infused with order and rhythmic unity.
In the late 1920s, Jonson began to turn entirely to abstraction. After this point, Jonson’s goal was to create ‘pure abstractions’, in which his final paintings retain ‘no items of detail or fact taken from the physical components of the ‘inspiration” of the work (Ibid; 76). In this way, he could be free of the constraints of subject matter and focus purely on the expressive possibilities of composition and color. To Jonson, the ultimate goal of painting, which he pursued throughout his career with rigorous, single-minded devotion, was to portray the sacred rather than the earthly. ‘Jonson did not believe the sacred to be ‘beyond all reach’ nor did he believe it to be ‘the hopeless quest.’ He believed that art is precisely the vehicle by which is expressed the otherwise inexpressible’ (Ibid; 106).
In 1938, Jonson’s work was profoundly impacted by his adoption of the airbrush. With the airbrush, Jonson found that he could create uniformity of surface, transparency of shapes, and smooth and subtle variations of color that had never been possible before. With the widespread availability of acrylic polymer paints in 1957, Jonson was able to free himself almost completely from technical considerations and devote himself whole-heartedly to the configurations of colors and shapes for which his later work is best known.
Jonson exhibited throughout his career in Chicago, New York, and New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of New Mexico.
Paul Kallos Paul Kallos was born in Hernádnémeti in Hungary into a middle-class family. He made his first drawings in 1938, during an illness which immobilized him for a few months. He started his secondary education in 1940 in Kiskunhalas, which was interrupted by the war. He was deported by the Nazi regime in 1944 to Auschwitz, where almost all of his relatives died.
In 1945 he returned to Hungary and entered the Budapest School of Fine Arts in 1946. Influenced by his friend Georges Feher, he worked on surrealism and geometric abstraction. In 1949 Kallos, alongside with Feher, secretly left Stalinist Hungary, spending one year in a refugee camp near Salzburg, Austria, in the French zone.
Kallos settled as a political refugee in Paris in a room near the Place Clichy, where he created small-scale works. He worked part-time for a furrier and frequently visited the Louvre, examining the works of old masters. In 1952, he began renting a workshop with Raymond Goden, an artist from Quebec. Paul Kallos became a French citizen since 1974.
As early as 1951 Paul Kallos sent four compositions to the “Salon des réalités nouvelles”, which he regularly participated until 1983. Pierre Loeb noticed one of these paintings in 1954 under contract in his gallery, andf through Loeb, Kalllos became friends with Vieira da Silva, Szenes, Lanskoy, Riopelle, Zao Wou-Ki and Wilfredo Lam. After Loeb’s death in 1964, Kallos exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Domec (1964, 1966 and 1967) and then at the gallery Nane Stern (1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1986).
He exhibited internationally in the 1950s and 60s, including exhibitions in London, Turin, New York, Basel and Toronto. In 1986, together with Victor Vasarely and other Hungarian emigrant artists, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Budapest.
Kallos' works are in The Centre Pompidou, Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon, the Denver Art Museum, and the museums of Tel Aviv, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Eindhoven, Rehovot, Metz , Evreux, and Epinal.
In 1945 he returned to Hungary and entered the Budapest School of Fine Arts in 1946. Influenced by his friend Georges Feher, he worked on surrealism and geometric abstraction. In 1949 Kallos, alongside with Feher, secretly left Stalinist Hungary, spending one year in a refugee camp near Salzburg, Austria, in the French zone.
Kallos settled as a political refugee in Paris in a room near the Place Clichy, where he created small-scale works. He worked part-time for a furrier and frequently visited the Louvre, examining the works of old masters. In 1952, he began renting a workshop with Raymond Goden, an artist from Quebec. Paul Kallos became a French citizen since 1974.
As early as 1951 Paul Kallos sent four compositions to the “Salon des réalités nouvelles”, which he regularly participated until 1983. Pierre Loeb noticed one of these paintings in 1954 under contract in his gallery, andf through Loeb, Kalllos became friends with Vieira da Silva, Szenes, Lanskoy, Riopelle, Zao Wou-Ki and Wilfredo Lam. After Loeb’s death in 1964, Kallos exhibited at the Galerie Pierre Domec (1964, 1966 and 1967) and then at the gallery Nane Stern (1971, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1986).
He exhibited internationally in the 1950s and 60s, including exhibitions in London, Turin, New York, Basel and Toronto. In 1986, together with Victor Vasarely and other Hungarian emigrant artists, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Budapest.
Kallos' works are in The Centre Pompidou, Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon, the Denver Art Museum, and the museums of Tel Aviv, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, Eindhoven, Rehovot, Metz , Evreux, and Epinal.
Ray Kass Ray Kass is an internationally recognized artist living and working in Virginia.
Kass is Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech, and founder and director of The Mountain Lake Workshop; an ongoing series of collaborative and inter-related workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The workshops have resulted in many unique, collaborative works of art that have been widely exhibited.
Kass is Professor Emeritus of Art at Virginia Tech, and founder and director of The Mountain Lake Workshop; an ongoing series of collaborative and inter-related workshops centered in the environmental, cultural, and community resources of the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The workshops have resulted in many unique, collaborative works of art that have been widely exhibited.
Jeffrey Keith Jeffrey Keith was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1954. He attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1972. In 1972 he attended the competitive California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Although Keith liked CalArts, he found a lack of support for figurative painting (his focus at the time), so he relocated to the San Francisco Art Institute from 1973-74 to be in the midst of the Bay Area Figurative School. Though certainly influenced by the paint-pushers of the New York Abstract Expressionist school, Keith was more strongly drawn to the figurative work of California painters like Richard Diebenkorn and the Bay Area “Bad Painters” such as David Park, Joan Brown, and Bruce McGaw, whom he studied under at the San Francisco Art Institute. Keith’s work is represented in many public, private and museum collections around the country and abroad. He has taught painting, drawing and color theory at the University of Denver School of Art and Art History for over 20 years, where he was named the 2001 Adjunct Faculty Member.
Leon Kelly Leon Kelly, born in 1901, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Awarded a traveling scholarship from that institution in 1924, he studied in Paris, France at the Grande Chaumiere. Other teachers included Arthur B. Carles, Jean Auguste Adolphe, Earl Horter and Alexandre Portinoff.
Essentially a Surrealist painter, Kelly did wide-ranging work that went from painterly to meticulous Surrealism, Cezanne-inspired watercolors, and Cubist painting. In the 1940s, Julian Levy, the Surrealist dealer, handled Kelly's work in New York City.
Kelly also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art Annuals (1933-34, 1939-46, 1966); Corcoran Gallery Biennials, Washington, D.C. (three times from 1935-47); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; had a 1965 retrospective exhibition at the International Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland; Long Beach, New Jersey (1968); Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (1968, 1970); Newark Museum, New Jersey (1969); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Kelly's paintings are in the collections of three New York city museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Modern Art; as well as Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; Sara Roby Foundation Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska; Newark Museum, New Jersey; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel.
Essentially a Surrealist painter, Kelly did wide-ranging work that went from painterly to meticulous Surrealism, Cezanne-inspired watercolors, and Cubist painting. In the 1940s, Julian Levy, the Surrealist dealer, handled Kelly's work in New York City.
Kelly also exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art Annuals (1933-34, 1939-46, 1966); Corcoran Gallery Biennials, Washington, D.C. (three times from 1935-47); Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; had a 1965 retrospective exhibition at the International Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland; Long Beach, New Jersey (1968); Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (1968, 1970); Newark Museum, New Jersey (1969); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Kelly's paintings are in the collections of three New York city museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Modern Art; as well as Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California; Sara Roby Foundation Collection at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska; Newark Museum, New Jersey; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel.
Clinton Blair King Clinton King is generally associated with the regional art of Texas and New Mexico (Santa Fe Art Colony) from 1924 up to 1940; after 1940 and into the 1960s, he exhibited often in Chicago, New York City, and Paris.
King was a painter of genre, portraiture, landscape, and still life. He was also a graphic artist, a teacher, and a talented pianist. His early modernist portraits and genre were often compared to Diego Rivera, a quality recognized in Mexico where King received his first one-man exhibition at the State Museum of Guadalajara in 1932.
Relative to his style of painting, Clinton King would have been very much at home in the Ecole de Paris (School of Paris). He was a modernist, and a Renaissance man of the art world, whose styles included Realism, Impressionism, and Abstract Expressionism at various periods in his 40 years of artistic activity.
Aside from his formal education at Virginia Military Institute, The University of Texas, and Princeton, King’s painting instructors included Charles Webster Hawthorne (Cape Cod School, Provincetown), Robert Reid (Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs), and Randall Davey (Studio, Santa Fe). His good friends in the art world included Pablo Picasso and the sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
King married two notable women. King met and married his first wife, Lady Duff-Twysden, in the Paris heyday of "the lost generation" (1927); she was socially prominent and already famous as the prototype of the romantic heroine Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1926). The couple lived in Santa Fe for a year after they married and then moved on to Mexico, Texas, and New York until their divorce around 1939. Kings second wife, Narcissa Swift, whom he met through their mutual friends Georgia O’Keeffe and Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos in 1941, was heiress to the famous meat packing company. She was a great champion of his work as well as a noted philanthropist and supporter of the 1960s civil rights movement. After Clinton’s death, she lived in Santa Fe until her death at age 87 in 1997.
King gained early recognition in Texas at Annual Texas Artists Exhibitions (Fort Worth, 1924-37). A portrait by King titled "Josefina" hung prominently in the legendary Texas Centennial Exposition (Dallas, 1936). His many solo exhibitions in Texas included: The Witte Museum, San Antonio (1933, 1955); Artists Guild, Fort Worth (1937); Texas Teachers College, Denton (1937); Elisabeth Ney Museum, Austin (1938); Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (1939); Corpus Christi Memorial Museum (1947). King’s exhibitions elsewhere include: Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (two in 1938, for watercolors and oil paintings); Associated American Artists, Chicago (1948) plus nine other shows at various Chicago galleries from 1941-66; and Feragil, New York City (1949, 1950). Two retrospective exhibitions were held in Santa Fe after his death: at the Armory for the Arts (1985) and at Fogelson Library Center, College of Santa Fe (1986).
During his lifetime, King’s paintings won many prizes, including: Annual Portrait Exhibition Prize (of Santa Fe writer Spud Johnson), at Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe in 1926; Carr Landscape Prize Art Institute, Chicago in 1943; Painting Prize at Petit Palais Museum, Paris in 1950. During his active career, his works were featured in 37 solo shows and 18 group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His group exhibitions include, at various times: National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art Annual, Southern States Art League Annual Exhibition, Corcoran Biennial, Carnegie Institute, St. Louis Art Museum, Toledo Art Museum, Rochester Art Museum, Parish Art Museum, and many others.
King’s paintings are held in many public collections, including: Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Library of Congress and National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Smith College; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Biblioteque Nationale and Municipal Collection, Paris.
King was a painter of genre, portraiture, landscape, and still life. He was also a graphic artist, a teacher, and a talented pianist. His early modernist portraits and genre were often compared to Diego Rivera, a quality recognized in Mexico where King received his first one-man exhibition at the State Museum of Guadalajara in 1932.
Relative to his style of painting, Clinton King would have been very much at home in the Ecole de Paris (School of Paris). He was a modernist, and a Renaissance man of the art world, whose styles included Realism, Impressionism, and Abstract Expressionism at various periods in his 40 years of artistic activity.
Aside from his formal education at Virginia Military Institute, The University of Texas, and Princeton, King’s painting instructors included Charles Webster Hawthorne (Cape Cod School, Provincetown), Robert Reid (Broadmoor Art Academy, Colorado Springs), and Randall Davey (Studio, Santa Fe). His good friends in the art world included Pablo Picasso and the sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
King married two notable women. King met and married his first wife, Lady Duff-Twysden, in the Paris heyday of "the lost generation" (1927); she was socially prominent and already famous as the prototype of the romantic heroine Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” (1926). The couple lived in Santa Fe for a year after they married and then moved on to Mexico, Texas, and New York until their divorce around 1939. Kings second wife, Narcissa Swift, whom he met through their mutual friends Georgia O’Keeffe and Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos in 1941, was heiress to the famous meat packing company. She was a great champion of his work as well as a noted philanthropist and supporter of the 1960s civil rights movement. After Clinton’s death, she lived in Santa Fe until her death at age 87 in 1997.
King gained early recognition in Texas at Annual Texas Artists Exhibitions (Fort Worth, 1924-37). A portrait by King titled "Josefina" hung prominently in the legendary Texas Centennial Exposition (Dallas, 1936). His many solo exhibitions in Texas included: The Witte Museum, San Antonio (1933, 1955); Artists Guild, Fort Worth (1937); Texas Teachers College, Denton (1937); Elisabeth Ney Museum, Austin (1938); Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (1939); Corpus Christi Memorial Museum (1947). King’s exhibitions elsewhere include: Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (two in 1938, for watercolors and oil paintings); Associated American Artists, Chicago (1948) plus nine other shows at various Chicago galleries from 1941-66; and Feragil, New York City (1949, 1950). Two retrospective exhibitions were held in Santa Fe after his death: at the Armory for the Arts (1985) and at Fogelson Library Center, College of Santa Fe (1986).
During his lifetime, King’s paintings won many prizes, including: Annual Portrait Exhibition Prize (of Santa Fe writer Spud Johnson), at Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe in 1926; Carr Landscape Prize Art Institute, Chicago in 1943; Painting Prize at Petit Palais Museum, Paris in 1950. During his active career, his works were featured in 37 solo shows and 18 group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His group exhibitions include, at various times: National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art Annual, Southern States Art League Annual Exhibition, Corcoran Biennial, Carnegie Institute, St. Louis Art Museum, Toledo Art Museum, Rochester Art Museum, Parish Art Museum, and many others.
King’s paintings are held in many public collections, including: Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; Library of Congress and National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; Smith College; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe; New York Public Library; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Biblioteque Nationale and Municipal Collection, Paris.
Vance Kirkland As an artist and educator, Vance Kirkland almost single-handedly brought modern art to Denver. At a time when conservative tastes ruled, he came to Colorado and worked in a manner that emphasized process more than subject matter. Rather than pleasing landscapes, he created paintings that expressed the dynamic forces of the universe, often with results that were strange and otherworldly. Standing on principle, he never wavered from his conviction that the arts were respected disciplines, and he constantly pushed for the inclusion of modern art in Denver's public institutions. Deliberately working away from the major art centers, Kirkland's varied art styles were determined by his own compass yet were nationally recognized.
Growing up in Ohio, Kirkland began his art studies at the Cleveland School of Art, where he received a diploma in painting and a bachelor's degree in art education. The former curator of the Denver Art Museum, Diane Vanderlip points to a failed watercolor class as an indicator of both his future stylistic development and his early self-confidence. When the teacher criticized Kirkland for colors that fought with each other, the young man listened to his own muse rather than pass the course.
Upon graduation, he was offered a job at Princeton, but when the university discovered just how young he was, they withdrew their offer. He then accepted an offer at the University of Denver to establish their art department in 1929. While most schools shunted art off to the side, Kirkland developed the program as a combination of academics and art. He also got officials to accept nude figure drawing. However, a parting of the ways came when he and the Provost clashed over degree recognition. The subsequent establishment of his Kirkland School of Art became a cultural beacon in this Rocky Mountain capitol.
Fom 1927 to 1944, he worked in a style he referred to as "Designed Realism," in which natural forms were highly stylized in rhythmic shapes. Working totally in watercolor, he developed an individualized method of applying dots to a saturated color surface. By the end of the thirties, Kirkland's paintings became larger and more energetic. Hiking in the mountains, the artist was inspired by the unusual shapes of high-altitude plants and trees stunted and bent by the fierce winds. Taking his painting gear, he had to add antifreeze to his paints in order to work in these demanding conditions.
Departing from his ordinary perspective, Kirkland created compositions of open spaces and wild linear elements, which he increasingly liberated from any specific representation. In his fantastic imaginings, he had an affinity with Surrealism, although he had no interest in their Freudian pursuits. Kirkland received national attention with inclusion in exhibitions, such as "Abstract and Surrealist American Art" at the Art Institute of Chicago and "Reality and Fantasy" at the Walker Art Center. In 1946, Knoedler and Company in New York invited him to be one of their artists, which brought solo shows and group exhibitions with artists like Max Ernst.
Beginning in the 1940s, he also became more active with the Denver Art Museum, serving in various honorary and formal positions. Both in his capacity as board member and curator, he relentlessly pressed for the recognition of contemporary art and artists. At the same time, his prestige grew when the University of Denver invited him back: this time as Director of the School of Art, Professor of Painting, and Chairman of the Department of Arts and Humanities. In 1941, he married Anne Fox Oliphant Olson, a librarian, and their home was a center for Denver's cultural life with evening salons and musical performances.
Hs first non-objective painting, "Red Abstraction" (1951) initiated his break with his past art. Looking back, Kirkland said, "There had to be a way of creating something and I became interested in abstraction." Deciding to forego watercolor, he experimented with paint and materials, particularly with inventive ways of mixing them. He had always been intrigued by the quality of resistance, and now he used the combination of oil and water to cause unexpected effects. The surface of his canvases became almost like breathing skins. Committed to his new direction, Kirkland didn't flinch when Knoedler's dropped him for abandoning his commercially successful style.
Moving to greater heights, Kirkland began painting large canvases that suggested cosmic phenomena, some of which he called "nebula." Although the fifties saw the birth of space exploration, the artist deliberately avoided any astronomical study, preferring instead to paint the mystery beyond his knowledge. When he saw pre-Hubble photographs that looked startlingly similar, he decided to stop.
Towards the end of his career, he returned to his earlier practice of layering the surface with dots. The works that first appeared in 1963 were geometric abstractions that share some of the qualities of contemporary Op Art. These later paintings were painstakingly done. Always a tireless worker, he pursued his art even after hepatitis made painting more difficult and physically excruciating, devising a system that suspended him over his canvases.
His studio on Pearl Street in Denver is now the Vance Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, a significant center for mid-century modernism in painting and the decorative arts.
Growing up in Ohio, Kirkland began his art studies at the Cleveland School of Art, where he received a diploma in painting and a bachelor's degree in art education. The former curator of the Denver Art Museum, Diane Vanderlip points to a failed watercolor class as an indicator of both his future stylistic development and his early self-confidence. When the teacher criticized Kirkland for colors that fought with each other, the young man listened to his own muse rather than pass the course.
Upon graduation, he was offered a job at Princeton, but when the university discovered just how young he was, they withdrew their offer. He then accepted an offer at the University of Denver to establish their art department in 1929. While most schools shunted art off to the side, Kirkland developed the program as a combination of academics and art. He also got officials to accept nude figure drawing. However, a parting of the ways came when he and the Provost clashed over degree recognition. The subsequent establishment of his Kirkland School of Art became a cultural beacon in this Rocky Mountain capitol.
Fom 1927 to 1944, he worked in a style he referred to as "Designed Realism," in which natural forms were highly stylized in rhythmic shapes. Working totally in watercolor, he developed an individualized method of applying dots to a saturated color surface. By the end of the thirties, Kirkland's paintings became larger and more energetic. Hiking in the mountains, the artist was inspired by the unusual shapes of high-altitude plants and trees stunted and bent by the fierce winds. Taking his painting gear, he had to add antifreeze to his paints in order to work in these demanding conditions.
Departing from his ordinary perspective, Kirkland created compositions of open spaces and wild linear elements, which he increasingly liberated from any specific representation. In his fantastic imaginings, he had an affinity with Surrealism, although he had no interest in their Freudian pursuits. Kirkland received national attention with inclusion in exhibitions, such as "Abstract and Surrealist American Art" at the Art Institute of Chicago and "Reality and Fantasy" at the Walker Art Center. In 1946, Knoedler and Company in New York invited him to be one of their artists, which brought solo shows and group exhibitions with artists like Max Ernst.
Beginning in the 1940s, he also became more active with the Denver Art Museum, serving in various honorary and formal positions. Both in his capacity as board member and curator, he relentlessly pressed for the recognition of contemporary art and artists. At the same time, his prestige grew when the University of Denver invited him back: this time as Director of the School of Art, Professor of Painting, and Chairman of the Department of Arts and Humanities. In 1941, he married Anne Fox Oliphant Olson, a librarian, and their home was a center for Denver's cultural life with evening salons and musical performances.
Hs first non-objective painting, "Red Abstraction" (1951) initiated his break with his past art. Looking back, Kirkland said, "There had to be a way of creating something and I became interested in abstraction." Deciding to forego watercolor, he experimented with paint and materials, particularly with inventive ways of mixing them. He had always been intrigued by the quality of resistance, and now he used the combination of oil and water to cause unexpected effects. The surface of his canvases became almost like breathing skins. Committed to his new direction, Kirkland didn't flinch when Knoedler's dropped him for abandoning his commercially successful style.
Moving to greater heights, Kirkland began painting large canvases that suggested cosmic phenomena, some of which he called "nebula." Although the fifties saw the birth of space exploration, the artist deliberately avoided any astronomical study, preferring instead to paint the mystery beyond his knowledge. When he saw pre-Hubble photographs that looked startlingly similar, he decided to stop.
Towards the end of his career, he returned to his earlier practice of layering the surface with dots. The works that first appeared in 1963 were geometric abstractions that share some of the qualities of contemporary Op Art. These later paintings were painstakingly done. Always a tireless worker, he pursued his art even after hepatitis made painting more difficult and physically excruciating, devising a system that suspended him over his canvases.
His studio on Pearl Street in Denver is now the Vance Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, a significant center for mid-century modernism in painting and the decorative arts.
Masatoyo Kishi Painter, printmaker, and sculptor Masatoyo Kishi - best known for mixing elements of traditional Japanese culture with Western abstraction - was born in Sakai, Japan, on March 11, 1924. He graduated with degrees in physics and mathematics from the Tokyo University of Science in 1953.
"As a Japanese artist in the 1950s in Tokyo, I didn't go to art school," said Kishi. "Japanese artists studied literature, economics, science; then you explored art."
After graduating, he pursued a short career as a mathematics teacher before he began exhibiting with Tekkei Kai, a group of abstract painters associated with the Kyoto Museum of Art.
From the late 1950s to the 1960s, he created his Opus paintings, which feature softly dripped pigments and sweeping brushwork. Using large brushes, Kishi painted his works by laying canvases horizontally and using wooden sticks to drip paint onto them.
"The paint brush is a difficult extension for me," Kishi explained. "What develops from this method is an orderly conversation between me and the canvas. I respond to each change taking place.”
In 1960, Kishi moved from Japan to San Francisco, where he lived until 1988. exhibited throughout the Bay Area and the U.S. and taught at Holy Names College in Oakland and the Dominican College in San Rafael.
Beginning in the 1970s Kishi's focus switched to sculpture, and by the mid '70s he was working almost exclusively in the three dimensional medium. In 1998, he relocated to Grass Valley, California, where he lived and worked until his death in 2017.
“Kishi’s paintings inspire a sense of chaos and awe,” said Jessica Phillips, director of Hackett Mill. “To look at a Kishi painting is to accept a challenge of sorts, one where you find yourself completely immersed in the rhythm of the paint as you try to trace the artist's hand not to learn how or why he painted in this way but rather to gain access to the lyrical complexity that resulted from it.”
His work is found in numerous museum collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; Oakland Museum of California; Stanford University Museum of Art; Stanford Art Gallery, Palo Alto; Barlow Building, Washington, D.C.; State University College at Potsdam, NY; and Guilford College, Greensboro, NC, among others.
biographical sources include Annex Galleries, Artforum
"As a Japanese artist in the 1950s in Tokyo, I didn't go to art school," said Kishi. "Japanese artists studied literature, economics, science; then you explored art."
After graduating, he pursued a short career as a mathematics teacher before he began exhibiting with Tekkei Kai, a group of abstract painters associated with the Kyoto Museum of Art.
From the late 1950s to the 1960s, he created his Opus paintings, which feature softly dripped pigments and sweeping brushwork. Using large brushes, Kishi painted his works by laying canvases horizontally and using wooden sticks to drip paint onto them.
"The paint brush is a difficult extension for me," Kishi explained. "What develops from this method is an orderly conversation between me and the canvas. I respond to each change taking place.”
In 1960, Kishi moved from Japan to San Francisco, where he lived until 1988. exhibited throughout the Bay Area and the U.S. and taught at Holy Names College in Oakland and the Dominican College in San Rafael.
Beginning in the 1970s Kishi's focus switched to sculpture, and by the mid '70s he was working almost exclusively in the three dimensional medium. In 1998, he relocated to Grass Valley, California, where he lived and worked until his death in 2017.
“Kishi’s paintings inspire a sense of chaos and awe,” said Jessica Phillips, director of Hackett Mill. “To look at a Kishi painting is to accept a challenge of sorts, one where you find yourself completely immersed in the rhythm of the paint as you try to trace the artist's hand not to learn how or why he painted in this way but rather to gain access to the lyrical complexity that resulted from it.”
His work is found in numerous museum collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; Oakland Museum of California; Stanford University Museum of Art; Stanford Art Gallery, Palo Alto; Barlow Building, Washington, D.C.; State University College at Potsdam, NY; and Guilford College, Greensboro, NC, among others.
biographical sources include Annex Galleries, Artforum
Elaine Kurtz Born Elaine Kahn in 1928, Kurtz graduated from what is now the University of the Arts in 1949, and married Jerome Kurtz in 1956. In the 1970's and 80's, New York City and Philadelphia were rife with her solo exhibitions.
William Valerio points out the "incredible finesse" of Kurtz's strokes with the brush: her color gradations are as smooth as a modern digital painting. Earlier work – such as a delicate gray still-life of flowers from 1970 – proves her skill as a draftsman. "If she wanted to draw a vase of flowers, she could," Valerio said. But she was usually after something far more challenging and enveloping than representational images.
William Valerio points out the "incredible finesse" of Kurtz's strokes with the brush: her color gradations are as smooth as a modern digital painting. Earlier work – such as a delicate gray still-life of flowers from 1970 – proves her skill as a draftsman. "If she wanted to draw a vase of flowers, she could," Valerio said. But she was usually after something far more challenging and enveloping than representational images.
Janet Lippincott "Abstract painting is an intellectual process. To be a modern painter and to make a truthful statement is the sum total of all I am and what I am continually striving to create. I am a painter and my paintings are all I can contribute to this world."
- Janet Lippincott, 1980, Southwest Art magazine
Born in New York into a privileged family, Janet Lippincott went to museums with her Aunt Gertrude, a modern dancer. When she saw her first Picasso, Lippincott was hooked, and residing in Paris for a period as a child brought her in contact with the most contemporary movements. At age fifteen, she took a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, where she would later enroll full time.
During World War II, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and was attached to General Eisenhower’s staff. Later she liked to tell the story of how Patton stormed in demanding to see Ike and how she told him to take a seat and keep his mouth shut.
In 1949, she drove to Taos for instruction in Emil Bisttram’s School of Art on the G.I. Bill. In response to the transcendental painter’s dismissal of her talent, Lippincott told him that the G.I. Bill was paying him and that she would stay. If anything, his criticism only made her determined to prove him wrong, and she was vindicated when her one-time teacher wrote a glowing review of her exhibition at the Jamison Gallery in 1972.
After studying with Bisttram and Alfred Morang, Lippincott briefly studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. She took a job at the San Francisco Art Institute, and returned to New Mexico in 1954, establishing a house and studio in Santa Fe.
Many the artists in Santa Fe at the time were working in response to the Southwestern landscape, light, and culture, with no attention paid to Abstract Expressionism. After having started painting landscapes and portraits, Lippincott had experienced her conversion. "After the war, I came out here, and NO ONE was doing any modern painting. Here I came with my screwball ideas and shook everybody up."
She garnered several awards for her work in this period, including the 1956 Annual Circle Exhibition, Roswell Museum, Roswell, New Mexico; the 1957 Purchase Award, 10th Graphic Exhibition, NM Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and the 1958 12th Graphic Exhibition, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lippincott found a deep well working in various media. She continued to keep drawing as an underlying discipline, and she was a member of a drawing group in Santa Fe for about 25 years until about 1987. Lippincott was one of the first artists to create lithographs at the Tamarind Institute. In the 1970s, she dove into sculpture, shortly after the Shidoni Foundry opened in Tesuque.
She was very much a loner and was married once for 10 days. "That was 10 days too long," art dealer Karen Ruhlen recalls the artist saying. While she enjoyed the company of a man, she was always self-reliant and "a little on the ornery side," Ruhlen adds. "Janet was an artist to the core. Making art was like breathing - it was her way of talking and expressing emotions."
Lippincott received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in New Mexico in 2002 and was honored in an exhibition by the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2003.
Upon her death in 2007, her estate, including documents, sketchbooks, and artworks, was donated to St. John's College in Santa Fe.
Her selected exhibtions include 1957, Los Artisanos, Las Vegas, New Mexico; 1957, Mexican-American Cultural Institute, Mexico City; 1958, Abstractions in Colored India Ink, La Galleria Escondida, Taos, NM; and 1959, Mid American Exhibition, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, among others.
Her works are in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; State Capital Art Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Harwood Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.
- Janet Lippincott, 1980, Southwest Art magazine
Born in New York into a privileged family, Janet Lippincott went to museums with her Aunt Gertrude, a modern dancer. When she saw her first Picasso, Lippincott was hooked, and residing in Paris for a period as a child brought her in contact with the most contemporary movements. At age fifteen, she took a life-drawing class at the Art Students League, where she would later enroll full time.
During World War II, she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps and was attached to General Eisenhower’s staff. Later she liked to tell the story of how Patton stormed in demanding to see Ike and how she told him to take a seat and keep his mouth shut.
In 1949, she drove to Taos for instruction in Emil Bisttram’s School of Art on the G.I. Bill. In response to the transcendental painter’s dismissal of her talent, Lippincott told him that the G.I. Bill was paying him and that she would stay. If anything, his criticism only made her determined to prove him wrong, and she was vindicated when her one-time teacher wrote a glowing review of her exhibition at the Jamison Gallery in 1972.
After studying with Bisttram and Alfred Morang, Lippincott briefly studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. She took a job at the San Francisco Art Institute, and returned to New Mexico in 1954, establishing a house and studio in Santa Fe.
Many the artists in Santa Fe at the time were working in response to the Southwestern landscape, light, and culture, with no attention paid to Abstract Expressionism. After having started painting landscapes and portraits, Lippincott had experienced her conversion. "After the war, I came out here, and NO ONE was doing any modern painting. Here I came with my screwball ideas and shook everybody up."
She garnered several awards for her work in this period, including the 1956 Annual Circle Exhibition, Roswell Museum, Roswell, New Mexico; the 1957 Purchase Award, 10th Graphic Exhibition, NM Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and the 1958 12th Graphic Exhibition, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Lippincott found a deep well working in various media. She continued to keep drawing as an underlying discipline, and she was a member of a drawing group in Santa Fe for about 25 years until about 1987. Lippincott was one of the first artists to create lithographs at the Tamarind Institute. In the 1970s, she dove into sculpture, shortly after the Shidoni Foundry opened in Tesuque.
She was very much a loner and was married once for 10 days. "That was 10 days too long," art dealer Karen Ruhlen recalls the artist saying. While she enjoyed the company of a man, she was always self-reliant and "a little on the ornery side," Ruhlen adds. "Janet was an artist to the core. Making art was like breathing - it was her way of talking and expressing emotions."
Lippincott received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in New Mexico in 2002 and was honored in an exhibition by the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2003.
Upon her death in 2007, her estate, including documents, sketchbooks, and artworks, was donated to St. John's College in Santa Fe.
Her selected exhibtions include 1957, Los Artisanos, Las Vegas, New Mexico; 1957, Mexican-American Cultural Institute, Mexico City; 1958, Abstractions in Colored India Ink, La Galleria Escondida, Taos, NM; and 1959, Mid American Exhibition, Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, among others.
Her works are in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, UT; Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; State Capital Art Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Harwood Foundation, Taos, New Mexico.
Ward Lockwood Born in Kansas, Ward Lockwood studied at the University of Kansas from 1912-1914. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art until 1916. Like many other artists at the time, he took a brief hiatus from his studies to begin a two-year enlistment in the Army during World War I. His time in the service allowed him to experience European cultures first hand. Lockwood was deeply impacted in France by the works of artists Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1921, after his release from the service, he returned to Paris to study at the Academie Ranson.
In Paris, he met fellow Kansan, Kenneth Adams. The two artists then traveled the French countryside, practicing their craft. In 1922, Lockwood's fascination with French culture was satiated as he returned to Kansas to work as a commercial artist.
By 1926, Lockwood had married Clyde Bonebrake. The newlyweds quickly settled in Taos, New Mexico, due to the encouragement of Kenneth Adams. Lockwood soon established himself as a member of the Taos Society of Artists. In an effort to generate greater financial stability, Lockwood did a variety of murals for the Federal Arts Project and went on to teach at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs. At this time, he taught painting and lithography and worked on Works Progress Administration murals with his mentor, Andrew Dasburg. In 1938, due to his continuous development as an artist and professor, he was awarded the chair of the Department of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.
During the 1950s, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. In 1940, he moved to San Francisco and experimented with abstraction and assemblage but was again in the Army during World War II, advancing to the rank of colonel.
After he completed his time in the service, he returned to California where he resumed teaching. Although he was highly involved in the art circles of California, Lockwood made frequent trips to Taos and finally settled there in his later years.
Public exhibitions of his work include: Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1922; Salons of America, 1925; Corcoran Gallery biennials, 1928-41; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Annex, 1929, 34, 38-39; Art Institute of Chicago (prizes 1931, 1952); Denver Art Museum; Nebraska Art Institute; de Young Museum, (prize 1950); San Francisco Art Festival, (prize 1950); Santa Rosa California (prize 1954); University of Utah, 1955; San Francisco Art Association, (purchase prize1957); Cranbrook Academy; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Weyhe Gallery; Dayton Art Institute; University of Illinois; Colorado Springs Fine Art Center; Museum of New Mexico; Dallas Museum of Fine Art; Texas General Exhibit; Mulvane Art Museum (solo); Rehn Gallery (solo); Wichita Art Museum (solo); Crocker Art Gallery (solo); University of Texas (solo); Museum of Fine Art, Houston (solo); St. Louis Art Museum (solo); Luyber Gallery (solo).
His work is found in many museum collections: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Iowa State College; Dallas Museum of Fine Art; Baker University; Wichita, Kansas Murals: Colorado Springs Fine Art Center; Federal Court Room, Lexington, Kentucky; WPA Murals at Taos, NM courthouse & United States Post Office in Wichita, KS, Wahington, DC, Edinburgh, TX & Hamilton, TX.
In Paris, he met fellow Kansan, Kenneth Adams. The two artists then traveled the French countryside, practicing their craft. In 1922, Lockwood's fascination with French culture was satiated as he returned to Kansas to work as a commercial artist.
By 1926, Lockwood had married Clyde Bonebrake. The newlyweds quickly settled in Taos, New Mexico, due to the encouragement of Kenneth Adams. Lockwood soon established himself as a member of the Taos Society of Artists. In an effort to generate greater financial stability, Lockwood did a variety of murals for the Federal Arts Project and went on to teach at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs. At this time, he taught painting and lithography and worked on Works Progress Administration murals with his mentor, Andrew Dasburg. In 1938, due to his continuous development as an artist and professor, he was awarded the chair of the Department of Art at the University of Texas in Austin.
During the 1950s, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. In 1940, he moved to San Francisco and experimented with abstraction and assemblage but was again in the Army during World War II, advancing to the rank of colonel.
After he completed his time in the service, he returned to California where he resumed teaching. Although he was highly involved in the art circles of California, Lockwood made frequent trips to Taos and finally settled there in his later years.
Public exhibitions of his work include: Salon d'Automne, Paris, 1922; Salons of America, 1925; Corcoran Gallery biennials, 1928-41; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Annex, 1929, 34, 38-39; Art Institute of Chicago (prizes 1931, 1952); Denver Art Museum; Nebraska Art Institute; de Young Museum, (prize 1950); San Francisco Art Festival, (prize 1950); Santa Rosa California (prize 1954); University of Utah, 1955; San Francisco Art Association, (purchase prize1957); Cranbrook Academy; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Weyhe Gallery; Dayton Art Institute; University of Illinois; Colorado Springs Fine Art Center; Museum of New Mexico; Dallas Museum of Fine Art; Texas General Exhibit; Mulvane Art Museum (solo); Rehn Gallery (solo); Wichita Art Museum (solo); Crocker Art Gallery (solo); University of Texas (solo); Museum of Fine Art, Houston (solo); St. Louis Art Museum (solo); Luyber Gallery (solo).
His work is found in many museum collections: Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Iowa State College; Dallas Museum of Fine Art; Baker University; Wichita, Kansas Murals: Colorado Springs Fine Art Center; Federal Court Room, Lexington, Kentucky; WPA Murals at Taos, NM courthouse & United States Post Office in Wichita, KS, Wahington, DC, Edinburgh, TX & Hamilton, TX.
William Thomas Lumpkins William Lumpkins, one of the only early modernists native to New Mexico, was born on a ranch west of Clayton, New Mexico. As a young boy, Lumpkins saw a man demonstrating painting techniques in the window of a hardware store in Holbrook, New Mexico, and decided that he wanted to be an artist. In 1929, he enrolled at the University of New Mexico to pursue a career in architecture. During this time, he took a portraiture class from the Swedish artist Nils Hogner, where he met many young modern artists, such as Cady Wells. These artists first introduced Lumpkins to the notion of art not only as means of representing the physical world, but as a vehicle of personal expression through line and color. In 1930, Lumpkins viewed an exhibition of New Mexico watercolors by the artist John Marin. Marin’s semi-abstract landscapes had a profound impact on Lumpkins, whose work was already developing toward abstraction.
In 1934, Lumpkins received his degree in architecture from the University of Southern California. In the following years, he worked as a junior architect for the Works Project Administration. In 1938, he returned to Santa Fe. Upon his return, he began to befriend many of the early New Mexico modernists, such as Jozef Bakos, Willard Nash, and B.J.O. Nordfeldt. He developed a particularly devoted friendship with the artist Raymond Jonson, who shared his passion for the expressive possibilities of abstract work. That same year, Jonson and Emil Bisttram founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. Lumpkins soon became a member. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. During this time, Lumpkins was also associated with
Los Cinco Pintores, a group which met in local cafes in Santa Fe and included Willard Nash, Walter Mruk, Fremont Ellis, Will Schuster and Josef Bakos.
Lumpkins is well-known in Santa Fe, not only for his participation in several of the most prominent artistic movements in New Mexico, but also for his innovation in architecture and solar technology. In 1935, he built his first passive solar house at Capitan. In 1972, he found Sun Mountain Design, a group of influential solar activists responsible for the solar demonstration center at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe.
After World War II, Lumpkins lived for a time in California, before returning with his wife and children to Santa Fe in 1967. In 1985, he founded the prestigious Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts. He continued to live and work in Santa Fe until his death in 2000.
Lumpkins’ paintings, both representational and abstract, exhibit a unique mastery with the medium of watercolor. According to Lumpkins, his “paintings are all developed through quiet meditation, following the reading of Zen koans” – short statements to provoke contemplation (Wiggins 1990; 17). Many of the titles of Lumpkins’ works are derived from these koans. The works poignantly communicate emotion and mood with a powerful eloquence of expression through shape, color, and space.
Lumpkins exhibited extensively throughout New Mexico. His work is included in such collections as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico, the Museum of New Mexico, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, and the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sources:
Wiggins, Walt. Lumpkins: Pioneer Abstract Expressionist. Ruidoso Downs, NM: Pintores Press, 1990.
In 1934, Lumpkins received his degree in architecture from the University of Southern California. In the following years, he worked as a junior architect for the Works Project Administration. In 1938, he returned to Santa Fe. Upon his return, he began to befriend many of the early New Mexico modernists, such as Jozef Bakos, Willard Nash, and B.J.O. Nordfeldt. He developed a particularly devoted friendship with the artist Raymond Jonson, who shared his passion for the expressive possibilities of abstract work. That same year, Jonson and Emil Bisttram founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. Lumpkins soon became a member. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. During this time, Lumpkins was also associated with
Los Cinco Pintores, a group which met in local cafes in Santa Fe and included Willard Nash, Walter Mruk, Fremont Ellis, Will Schuster and Josef Bakos.
Lumpkins is well-known in Santa Fe, not only for his participation in several of the most prominent artistic movements in New Mexico, but also for his innovation in architecture and solar technology. In 1935, he built his first passive solar house at Capitan. In 1972, he found Sun Mountain Design, a group of influential solar activists responsible for the solar demonstration center at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe.
After World War II, Lumpkins lived for a time in California, before returning with his wife and children to Santa Fe in 1967. In 1985, he founded the prestigious Santa Fe Institute of Fine Arts. He continued to live and work in Santa Fe until his death in 2000.
Lumpkins’ paintings, both representational and abstract, exhibit a unique mastery with the medium of watercolor. According to Lumpkins, his “paintings are all developed through quiet meditation, following the reading of Zen koans” – short statements to provoke contemplation (Wiggins 1990; 17). Many of the titles of Lumpkins’ works are derived from these koans. The works poignantly communicate emotion and mood with a powerful eloquence of expression through shape, color, and space.
Lumpkins exhibited extensively throughout New Mexico. His work is included in such collections as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico, the Museum of New Mexico, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, and the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sources:
Wiggins, Walt. Lumpkins: Pioneer Abstract Expressionist. Ruidoso Downs, NM: Pintores Press, 1990.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) was one of America’s leading modernist painters and an early pioneer of abstract art. Born in Virginia and raised in southern California, he enrolled at the Art Students League in Los Angeles as a precocious thirteen-year-old. In 1907, while still a teenager, he married and then settled in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and several art academies, including the Académie Colorossi and the École des Beaux Arts, and then privately with Percyval Hart-Tudor, who taught color theory in relation to music. Inspired chiefly by the works of Cézanne, Matisse, and the Cubists, Macdonald-Wright exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1910 and at the Salon des Indépendents in 1912. Together with fellow American expatriate Morgan Russell, Macdonald-Wright cofounded the avant-garde painting movement Synchromism, whose first exhibition was held in Munich in the summer of 1913 and the second in Paris during the fall of the same year. These were soon followed by shows in London, Milan, and Warsaw. And in early 1914 Synchromist paintings were exhibited for the first time in New York. Similar to its rival Parisian movement Orphism, Synchromism combined color with Cubism, producing luminous and rhythmic compositions of swirling and serpentine forms infused with a rich chromatic palette. As Macdonald-Wright later described it, “Synchromism simply means ‘with color’ as symphony means ‘with sound’, and our idea was to produce an art whose genesis lay, not in objectivity, but in form produced in color”.
At the outbreak of World War I, Macdonald-Wright moved to London with his older sibling, Willard Huntington Wright, who was an editor and author. Sharing quarters there for the next two years, the brothers collaborated on three art books, including Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning (1915), that were subsequently published in New York. After repatriating himself to the United States in 1915, Macdonald-Wright took up residence in New York, where he participated in the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916 and was given his first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery the following year. His Synchromist paintings had a direct and marked influence on the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, Jan Matulka, Stuart Davis, Arnold Friedman, and Alfred Maurer.
Although successful in New York, Macdonald-Wright became increasingly dissatisfied with what he saw as the “sterile artistic formulism” of modern art and the “academicism” of his own Synchromism. Consequently, he permanently resettled in Santa Monica in 1919 and withdrew from the commercial art scene for the following three decades. Instead, he became an active and energetic force in the southern Californian art world primarily as a teacher and administrator, all the while still continuing his artistic pursuits, which turned heavily toward Eastern representational models, especially Chinese painting. From 1922 to 1930 he served as Director of the Art Students League in Los Angeles, writing a student textbook entitled Treatise on Color (1924). During the late twenties and early thirties, he co-exhibited at several museums in California with Morgan Russell and had a one-man show at Stieglitz’s “An American Place” in New York in 1932. He then worked for the WPA Art Project as Director of Southern California and as Technical Advisor for seven western states from 1935 to 1942, during which time he personally completed several major civil art projects, including the murals at the Santa Monica City Hall. During World War II and up through 1952, Macdonald-Wright taught at UCLA, USC, Scripps College, and the University of Hawaii on the subjects of art history, Oriental aesthetics, and iconography. In 1952-53, he visited Japan as a Fulbright exchange professor and briefly lectured at Kyoiku Daigaku (Tokyo University of Education). Finally, in 1954, he retired from academia. After a hiatus of more than thirty years, Macdonald-Wright returned to nonobjective painting in the mid 1950s with renewed vigor and enthusiasm, producing some of his finest canvases. This new body of Neo-Synchromist work surpassed the artist’s earlier paintings by way of a heightened luminosity and augmented spatiality, creating as a result, in the opinion of the modern art champion, Alfred Barr, a deeper spirituality. As the artist himself described it, “At first I saw my new painting with a certain astonishment, for I had made the “great circle”, coming back after 35 years to an art that was, superficially, not unlike the canvases of my youth. However, at bottom there was a great difference: I had achieved an interior realism, what is called yugen by the Japanese. This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen but which is evident by feeling, and I am certain that this quality of hidden reality was what I felt to be lacking in my younger days.” From 1958 on, Macdonald-Wright spent five months each year at Kenninji, a Zen monastery in the center of Kyoto, Japan. One of the most fruitful outcomes of his exposure to Japanese poetry and art was the creation of the Haiga portfolio (1965-66), a suite of twenty Haiku illustrations in brilliant color that is a masterful synthesis of modernist art in the Synchromist style and the traditional technique of Japanese woodblock printing.
In 1967 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts held a major retrospective exhibition on Macdonald-Wright, honoring his more than six decades of artistic achievement. During the remaining years of his life and up until his passing in 1973 at the age of 83, Macdonald-Wright continued to be productive and inventive, leaving as his legacy a large and diverse body of modernist painting, which has since taken its rightful place as being of premier importance in American twentieth-century art. ~ Andrew Diversey
References:
Daviee, Jerry M. 1982. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Watercolors and Drawings. San
Francisco: The Art Museum Association.
Figoten, Sheldon. 1985. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Paintings 1953-1964. Redding, CA: Redding Museum and Art Center.
Scott, David W. and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. 1967. The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Press.
South, Will. 2001. Color, Music, and Myth. Stanton Macdonald-Wright and
Synchromism. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art.
Wight, Frederick. 1970. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: A Retrospective Exhibition 1911-1970. Los Angeles: The UCLA Art Galleries.
At the outbreak of World War I, Macdonald-Wright moved to London with his older sibling, Willard Huntington Wright, who was an editor and author. Sharing quarters there for the next two years, the brothers collaborated on three art books, including Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning (1915), that were subsequently published in New York. After repatriating himself to the United States in 1915, Macdonald-Wright took up residence in New York, where he participated in the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916 and was given his first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery the following year. His Synchromist paintings had a direct and marked influence on the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Dasburg, Jan Matulka, Stuart Davis, Arnold Friedman, and Alfred Maurer.
Although successful in New York, Macdonald-Wright became increasingly dissatisfied with what he saw as the “sterile artistic formulism” of modern art and the “academicism” of his own Synchromism. Consequently, he permanently resettled in Santa Monica in 1919 and withdrew from the commercial art scene for the following three decades. Instead, he became an active and energetic force in the southern Californian art world primarily as a teacher and administrator, all the while still continuing his artistic pursuits, which turned heavily toward Eastern representational models, especially Chinese painting. From 1922 to 1930 he served as Director of the Art Students League in Los Angeles, writing a student textbook entitled Treatise on Color (1924). During the late twenties and early thirties, he co-exhibited at several museums in California with Morgan Russell and had a one-man show at Stieglitz’s “An American Place” in New York in 1932. He then worked for the WPA Art Project as Director of Southern California and as Technical Advisor for seven western states from 1935 to 1942, during which time he personally completed several major civil art projects, including the murals at the Santa Monica City Hall. During World War II and up through 1952, Macdonald-Wright taught at UCLA, USC, Scripps College, and the University of Hawaii on the subjects of art history, Oriental aesthetics, and iconography. In 1952-53, he visited Japan as a Fulbright exchange professor and briefly lectured at Kyoiku Daigaku (Tokyo University of Education). Finally, in 1954, he retired from academia. After a hiatus of more than thirty years, Macdonald-Wright returned to nonobjective painting in the mid 1950s with renewed vigor and enthusiasm, producing some of his finest canvases. This new body of Neo-Synchromist work surpassed the artist’s earlier paintings by way of a heightened luminosity and augmented spatiality, creating as a result, in the opinion of the modern art champion, Alfred Barr, a deeper spirituality. As the artist himself described it, “At first I saw my new painting with a certain astonishment, for I had made the “great circle”, coming back after 35 years to an art that was, superficially, not unlike the canvases of my youth. However, at bottom there was a great difference: I had achieved an interior realism, what is called yugen by the Japanese. This is a sense of reality which cannot be seen but which is evident by feeling, and I am certain that this quality of hidden reality was what I felt to be lacking in my younger days.” From 1958 on, Macdonald-Wright spent five months each year at Kenninji, a Zen monastery in the center of Kyoto, Japan. One of the most fruitful outcomes of his exposure to Japanese poetry and art was the creation of the Haiga portfolio (1965-66), a suite of twenty Haiku illustrations in brilliant color that is a masterful synthesis of modernist art in the Synchromist style and the traditional technique of Japanese woodblock printing.
In 1967 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts held a major retrospective exhibition on Macdonald-Wright, honoring his more than six decades of artistic achievement. During the remaining years of his life and up until his passing in 1973 at the age of 83, Macdonald-Wright continued to be productive and inventive, leaving as his legacy a large and diverse body of modernist painting, which has since taken its rightful place as being of premier importance in American twentieth-century art. ~ Andrew Diversey
References:
Daviee, Jerry M. 1982. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Watercolors and Drawings. San
Francisco: The Art Museum Association.
Figoten, Sheldon. 1985. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Paintings 1953-1964. Redding, CA: Redding Museum and Art Center.
Scott, David W. and Stanton Macdonald-Wright. 1967. The Art of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Press.
South, Will. 2001. Color, Music, and Myth. Stanton Macdonald-Wright and
Synchromism. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art.
Wight, Frederick. 1970. Stanton Macdonald-Wright: A Retrospective Exhibition 1911-1970. Los Angeles: The UCLA Art Galleries.
Ati Maier Ati Maier is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, photography, 3-D video animation, installation, performance, and live action video.She was born in Munich, Germany in 1962 and has studied, lived and worked in Vienna, Berlin and New York City.
Maier writes about her working process:
"I start with 3-15 overlapping sketches with which I create multiple layers suggesting the possibility of a novel compositional architecture. For example, I might begin with an abstract grid, add a galactic structure, then landscapes on top. It is in this time-consuming period that shapes begin to form and subside, subdivide and cut through and across one another. I weave the layers of space together in such a way that foreground, middle ground and background along with past, present and future become one dense coherence. Through my process the painting is like an organically growing puzzle coming together. The final image can never be predicted, as it is a direct result of the physical and the mental space I am in when I make the work.
I act as a sampler (as in music) of the abundant information available. Scientific theories, technological and geological models, maps, digital and satellite views, as well as NASA websites, books and magazines form the catalyst and interior armature for all of my work.
The vast open landscape and the big sky of the American West became an obsession as I was riding through it on horseback. I am an explorer, using geographical structures, rock formations, unique earth faults, weather phenomena etc. as visual and conceptual sources. Although my work is largely abstract, it is very much about making invisible energies and wavelengths visible.
Recently, I also began working with 3-D animated videos derived from my drawings. I basically re-build the drawings into a 3D model, making them move through time as well as space. In the animations, as well as my 2-D works, I aim to suggest new visual metaphors for our experience in non-linear, virtual spatial systems."
Maier’s 3D video animation was included in the Fokus Bienial in Lódz, Poland and her paintings are part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig (Germany), amongst others. She is a recipient of the Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant and a Joan MItchell Foundation grant.
Maier's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (Germany) and “Remote Viewing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Montauk, NY; Aspen Art Collection; MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trentino, Italy; Staedtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig, Bergmeier Collection, Germany; BAM Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Guilin Art Museum, Guilin, Guangxi, P.R. China. She currently lives in Brooklyn and New Mexico.
Maier writes about her working process:
"I start with 3-15 overlapping sketches with which I create multiple layers suggesting the possibility of a novel compositional architecture. For example, I might begin with an abstract grid, add a galactic structure, then landscapes on top. It is in this time-consuming period that shapes begin to form and subside, subdivide and cut through and across one another. I weave the layers of space together in such a way that foreground, middle ground and background along with past, present and future become one dense coherence. Through my process the painting is like an organically growing puzzle coming together. The final image can never be predicted, as it is a direct result of the physical and the mental space I am in when I make the work.
I act as a sampler (as in music) of the abundant information available. Scientific theories, technological and geological models, maps, digital and satellite views, as well as NASA websites, books and magazines form the catalyst and interior armature for all of my work.
The vast open landscape and the big sky of the American West became an obsession as I was riding through it on horseback. I am an explorer, using geographical structures, rock formations, unique earth faults, weather phenomena etc. as visual and conceptual sources. Although my work is largely abstract, it is very much about making invisible energies and wavelengths visible.
Recently, I also began working with 3-D animated videos derived from my drawings. I basically re-build the drawings into a 3D model, making them move through time as well as space. In the animations, as well as my 2-D works, I aim to suggest new visual metaphors for our experience in non-linear, virtual spatial systems."
Maier’s 3D video animation was included in the Fokus Bienial in Lódz, Poland and her paintings are part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig (Germany), amongst others. She is a recipient of the Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant and a Joan MItchell Foundation grant.
Maier's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg (Germany) and “Remote Viewing” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Montauk, NY; Aspen Art Collection; MART, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trentino, Italy; Staedtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Museum der bildenden Kuenste Leipzig, Bergmeier Collection, Germany; BAM Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Guilin Art Museum, Guilin, Guangxi, P.R. China. She currently lives in Brooklyn and New Mexico.
Beatrice Mandelman Born on December 31, 1912 in Newark, New Jersey, from an early age Beatrice Mandelman was determined to be an artist. At age 12, she began taking classes at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. In the 1930s, she attended Rutgers University, the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and the Art Students League in New York City.
In 1935 Mandelman was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. One of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, Mandelman worked in the WPA until 1942, when it was disbanded.
During this period she was associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis. By 1941, Mandelman’s works were included in important exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
In 1942 Mandelman married Louis Ribak and in 1944, they traveled to Santa Fe to visit Ribak’s teacher and mentor, the artist John Sloan, who’d recommended the climate and atmosphere. Finding Santa Fe congested, they took the train along the Rio Grande and a stagecoach up to Taos and decided to settle there.
An impulsive and inspired move, it was a decision that would effectively remove them from the art world’s mainstream. In 1944 Taos was a well-known art community, but there were no galleries exhibiting modern art. A new influx of artists from New York and California during the late 40s and 50s would change this. A group of these artists, including Mandelman and Ribak, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, would become known as the “Taos Moderns”.
Mandelman was an intensely dedicated painter. In the relative isolation of Northern New Mexico she found the freedom to develop a style that was distinctly her own. Inspired by the light, the local color, the landscape and the confluence of diverse cultures in Taos, her work flourished.
Through out her lifetime, together with Ribak and after his death in 1979, Mandelman was adventurous and profoundly curious about art and life and culture. She loved to travel and drew inspiration from it. Over the years she lived for extended periods in Mexico and traveled extensively in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Beatrice Mandelman died on June 25th, 1998 at home in Taos. In the last months of her life, she produced the thirty-one works in the Winter series. Over the span of seven decades, Beatrice Mandelman produced a body of work consisting of hundreds of paintings, prints, collages, and works on paper. Her work is held in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Denver Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; works are also on long-term loan at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Biography courtesy of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
In 1935 Mandelman was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a muralist and then as a printmaker with the Graphic Division of the New York Project. One of the original members of the Silk Screen Unit under Anthony Velonis, Mandelman worked in the WPA until 1942, when it was disbanded.
During this period she was associated with numerous New York School artists including Louis Lozowick, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Stuart Davis. By 1941, Mandelman’s works were included in important exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
In 1942 Mandelman married Louis Ribak and in 1944, they traveled to Santa Fe to visit Ribak’s teacher and mentor, the artist John Sloan, who’d recommended the climate and atmosphere. Finding Santa Fe congested, they took the train along the Rio Grande and a stagecoach up to Taos and decided to settle there.
An impulsive and inspired move, it was a decision that would effectively remove them from the art world’s mainstream. In 1944 Taos was a well-known art community, but there were no galleries exhibiting modern art. A new influx of artists from New York and California during the late 40s and 50s would change this. A group of these artists, including Mandelman and Ribak, Ed Corbett, Agnes Martin, Oli Sihvonen, and Clay Spohn, would become known as the “Taos Moderns”.
Mandelman was an intensely dedicated painter. In the relative isolation of Northern New Mexico she found the freedom to develop a style that was distinctly her own. Inspired by the light, the local color, the landscape and the confluence of diverse cultures in Taos, her work flourished.
Through out her lifetime, together with Ribak and after his death in 1979, Mandelman was adventurous and profoundly curious about art and life and culture. She loved to travel and drew inspiration from it. Over the years she lived for extended periods in Mexico and traveled extensively in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Beatrice Mandelman died on June 25th, 1998 at home in Taos. In the last months of her life, she produced the thirty-one works in the Winter series. Over the span of seven decades, Beatrice Mandelman produced a body of work consisting of hundreds of paintings, prints, collages, and works on paper. Her work is held in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Denver Art Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; works are also on long-term loan at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Biography courtesy of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation
Franco Marzilli Franco Marzilli is an Italian Modernist painter and sculptor from Rome. His life's work is extremely varied, ranging from landscapes of the Roman Lazio countryside, to still lifes, to abstract subjects. Marzilli was at ease among landscape, still life and figure. His famous Roman landscapes, demonstrate a strength of draughtsmanship, enhanced by the extreme smoothness and refinement of color. In Marzilli's still lifes the bright colors are always wonderfully juxtaposed by lemons, grapes, apples, flowers that have the solidity of his ceramic sculptures, promising the fragrance and scent of reality.
Jan Matulka Jan Matulka was born in 1890 in a small town southwest of Prague, in what later became Czechoslovakia. In 1905 he took his first art classes in Prague, and two years later his family emigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx, New York.
He then began taking classes at the National Academy of Design, continuing there through 1917. After he finished his training, he moved into a studio apartment in Manhattan and met Lida Jirouskova, whom he married in 1918. Throughout this time he traveled quite extensively, visiting the southwest United States, Czechoslovakia, Paris, and Prague.
In 1917 he lived in New Mexico, where he adopted a cubist style and painted some the earliest modernist works in the Southwest. In addition, he also painted directly from life, recording ceremonial scenes and daily life in the Pueblos.
In 1926 Katherine Dreier arranged his first important one-man exhibition at The Art Center, 65 East 56th Street in New York. However their relationship soon began to sour due to disagreements.
In 1931, Stuart Davis arranged a showing of his own work at the Art Students League along with the work of Matulka, John Graham, and Arshile Gorky, which began a professional friendship between the four. Ultimately Matulka's position at the League was eliminated in part because of opposition from conservative faculty members.
In 1933, he made his final visit to Europe and gave up his Paris studio to Josef Sima. In 1935 he joined the Federal Art Project (FAP) under the WPA, where he created the mural "Synthesis of American Music and History." His affiliation with FAP ended in 1939.
In 1944 he had a solo exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery and after that time dropped off the artistic map, but still kept working until his death in 1972. In 1969 his name was mentioned in the retrospective catalog for David Smith as his biggest influence, and Matulka's work began to sell again. In 1970 New York dealer Robert Schoelkopf began representing Matulka and gave him a solo exhibition.
In 1979 a retrospective of Matulka's work opened at the Whitney Museum of Art, and in 1982 an exhibition of works donated by Lida Matulka was organized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Thomas McCormick Gallery in Chicago was responsible for reviving interest in Matulka's work, organizing a one-person exhibition in 1995, as well as the subsequent exhibition "Jan Matulka: The Global Modernist," which traveled to six museums around the United States from 2004-2006.
His work is found in numerous museum collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth; Detroit Institute of Arts; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Courtesy of McCormick Gallery
He then began taking classes at the National Academy of Design, continuing there through 1917. After he finished his training, he moved into a studio apartment in Manhattan and met Lida Jirouskova, whom he married in 1918. Throughout this time he traveled quite extensively, visiting the southwest United States, Czechoslovakia, Paris, and Prague.
In 1917 he lived in New Mexico, where he adopted a cubist style and painted some the earliest modernist works in the Southwest. In addition, he also painted directly from life, recording ceremonial scenes and daily life in the Pueblos.
In 1926 Katherine Dreier arranged his first important one-man exhibition at The Art Center, 65 East 56th Street in New York. However their relationship soon began to sour due to disagreements.
In 1931, Stuart Davis arranged a showing of his own work at the Art Students League along with the work of Matulka, John Graham, and Arshile Gorky, which began a professional friendship between the four. Ultimately Matulka's position at the League was eliminated in part because of opposition from conservative faculty members.
In 1933, he made his final visit to Europe and gave up his Paris studio to Josef Sima. In 1935 he joined the Federal Art Project (FAP) under the WPA, where he created the mural "Synthesis of American Music and History." His affiliation with FAP ended in 1939.
In 1944 he had a solo exhibition at the A.C.A. Gallery and after that time dropped off the artistic map, but still kept working until his death in 1972. In 1969 his name was mentioned in the retrospective catalog for David Smith as his biggest influence, and Matulka's work began to sell again. In 1970 New York dealer Robert Schoelkopf began representing Matulka and gave him a solo exhibition.
In 1979 a retrospective of Matulka's work opened at the Whitney Museum of Art, and in 1982 an exhibition of works donated by Lida Matulka was organized at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Thomas McCormick Gallery in Chicago was responsible for reviving interest in Matulka's work, organizing a one-person exhibition in 1995, as well as the subsequent exhibition "Jan Matulka: The Global Modernist," which traveled to six museums around the United States from 2004-2006.
His work is found in numerous museum collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Forth Worth; Detroit Institute of Arts; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Courtesy of McCormick Gallery
J. Jay McVicker Jesse Jay McVicker, known professionally as J. Jay McVicker, was an American artist. Although best known for his printmaking - particularly his early aquatints and his experimental use of intaglio techniques - McVicker was equally proficient as a painter and sculptor throughout his career.
McVicker was born October 18, 1911, one of five children born to Jesse Allen and Clara Mae (Hendrick) McVicker, and from childhood was known as J. Jay. In 1915, the family moved to Berlin, Oklahoma, a small rural community northwest of Oklahoma City.
He attended school in the nearby town of Weatherford, Oklahoma, and became a championship wrestler. He enrolled at the Southwestern Institute of Technology (now Southwestern Oklahoma State University), also in Weatherford, from 1930 to 1932. In 1938, he married Laura Beth Paul (1909–1993), while he was a student at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University).
A student of Ella Jack and Doel Reed at Oklahoma State University, McVicker showed early promise as a Regionalist watercolorist and printmaker, and received both a BA (1940) and an MA (1941) from the school. Because the university didn't offer a Master of Fine Arts degree at the time, McVicker wrote an art history thesis that surveyed the use of color in European painting from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. After graduation, McVicker joined the faculty at OSU. He became head of the Art Department in 1959, and retired on May 31, 1977.
By the time the United States joined the Second World War, McVicker was well-known for his Regionalist prints and watercolors. During the 1940s McVicker produced black and white aquatints depicting his native Oklahoma landscape as well as industrialscapes in a very representational style. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he introduced color to his images in aquatint as well as silkscreen. It was during this time that he began shifting his style towards cubism and abstraction, and even non-objectivity in all media.
Apart from a couple of years in California and in the U.S. Navy, McVicker spent his entire life in Oklahoma. His work, however, was exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and the Downtown Gallery in New York City, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, France.
McVicker passed away in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 2004.
His exhibits included San Francisco Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Museum of Art, Museum of Non-‐‑Objective Painting, New York, Chicago Art Institute, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Denver Art Museum, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Downtown Gallery, New York, Pasadena Art Institute, Oakland Art Gallery, Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, Library of Congress, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Institute, The Print Club of Philadelphia, Joslyn Memorial Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Salon Des Realites Nouvelles, Paris, Galleria Origine, Rome, Whitney Museum of American Art and Momentum Mid-‐‑Continental, Chicago.
He is included in the following collections: Library of Congress, Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, Texas, Springfield Art Museum, Missouri, Seattle Art Museum (Northwest Printmaking Collection), Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tenn., Birmingham Public Library, Chapman Collection, Society of American Etchers Collection, California Water Color Society Collection, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Wichita Art Association, Chicago Society of Etchers Collection, Philbrook Art Center, Laguna Beach Art Association, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joslyn Art Museum, numerous private collections and United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
He has had exhibits in group shows of prints abroad including Istanbul, Athens, Cairo, Manila, London, Brussels, Lyon, Rome, Vienna, Belgrade, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico, Norway, Casablanca, Saigon, Paris, Bordighera, Lima, Panama and Germany.
He is included in "Who'ʹs Who in American Art", "Who'ʹs Who in America" and "Who'ʹs Who in the World."
McVicker was born October 18, 1911, one of five children born to Jesse Allen and Clara Mae (Hendrick) McVicker, and from childhood was known as J. Jay. In 1915, the family moved to Berlin, Oklahoma, a small rural community northwest of Oklahoma City.
He attended school in the nearby town of Weatherford, Oklahoma, and became a championship wrestler. He enrolled at the Southwestern Institute of Technology (now Southwestern Oklahoma State University), also in Weatherford, from 1930 to 1932. In 1938, he married Laura Beth Paul (1909–1993), while he was a student at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University).
A student of Ella Jack and Doel Reed at Oklahoma State University, McVicker showed early promise as a Regionalist watercolorist and printmaker, and received both a BA (1940) and an MA (1941) from the school. Because the university didn't offer a Master of Fine Arts degree at the time, McVicker wrote an art history thesis that surveyed the use of color in European painting from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century. After graduation, McVicker joined the faculty at OSU. He became head of the Art Department in 1959, and retired on May 31, 1977.
By the time the United States joined the Second World War, McVicker was well-known for his Regionalist prints and watercolors. During the 1940s McVicker produced black and white aquatints depicting his native Oklahoma landscape as well as industrialscapes in a very representational style. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he introduced color to his images in aquatint as well as silkscreen. It was during this time that he began shifting his style towards cubism and abstraction, and even non-objectivity in all media.
Apart from a couple of years in California and in the U.S. Navy, McVicker spent his entire life in Oklahoma. His work, however, was exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and the Downtown Gallery in New York City, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, France.
McVicker passed away in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in 2004.
His exhibits included San Francisco Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Museum of Art, Museum of Non-‐‑Objective Painting, New York, Chicago Art Institute, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Denver Art Museum, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, National Academy of Design, Downtown Gallery, New York, Pasadena Art Institute, Oakland Art Gallery, Isaac Delgado Museum of Art, New Orleans, Library of Congress, United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Institute, The Print Club of Philadelphia, Joslyn Memorial Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Salon Des Realites Nouvelles, Paris, Galleria Origine, Rome, Whitney Museum of American Art and Momentum Mid-‐‑Continental, Chicago.
He is included in the following collections: Library of Congress, Stephen F. Austin State Teachers College, Texas, Springfield Art Museum, Missouri, Seattle Art Museum (Northwest Printmaking Collection), Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, Tenn., Birmingham Public Library, Chapman Collection, Society of American Etchers Collection, California Water Color Society Collection, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Wichita Art Association, Chicago Society of Etchers Collection, Philbrook Art Center, Laguna Beach Art Association, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joslyn Art Museum, numerous private collections and United States National Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
He has had exhibits in group shows of prints abroad including Istanbul, Athens, Cairo, Manila, London, Brussels, Lyon, Rome, Vienna, Belgrade, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico, Norway, Casablanca, Saigon, Paris, Bordighera, Lima, Panama and Germany.
He is included in "Who'ʹs Who in American Art", "Who'ʹs Who in America" and "Who'ʹs Who in the World."
Josef Meierhans Born in Aargau, Switzerland, in 1890, Joseph Meierhans studied textile design in Zurich before coming to America in 1917. He first visited New York City while working for a Swiss textile mill. During this visit, Meierhans was offered a position with an American manufacturer as a textile designer and decided to stay. Meierhans was captivated by the New York art scene and soon began evening studies with Karl Knaths and later with John Sloan at the Art Students League from 1919-1921. He also studied with A. N. Lindenmuth in Allentown.
In 1932, Meierhans had saved enough money from the textile business to buy a unique 52-acre property in Hagersville, Pennsylvania, about fifteen miles from New Hope. Dubbed the Meierhans Manor, amidst rolling acres of farmland sat a stately Victorian mansion surrounded by an assortment of farm structures. There, he converted a 200-foot-long chicken coop into a studio and art gallery. For the next twenty-five years he divided his time between New York and Bucks County, devoting as much time as possible to his painting. In 1957 he retired from the textile business enabling him to concentrate solely on his art. A generous man dedicated to familiarizing people with the rich local artistic tradition, Meierhans made exhibition space in his gallery available to seven other artists each year. Over the years, Ben Solowey and Katherine Steele Renninger were among the many artists to take advantage of this opportunity.
While spending all of his “painting time” in Pennsylvania, Meierhans made efforts to stay involved in the New York art scene. He exhibited in the 1940s and 1950s at the Artist’s Gallery in New York where he was the recipient of five one-man shows. Meierhans also joined the avant-garde group known as AAA (American Abstract Artists) exhibiting in New York from 1946-1957 and in as faraway places as Europe and Japan. He also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Provincetown Art Association, American Federation of Artists Traveling Exchange, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo (1956), and the Crest Gallery, New Hope (solo 1958).
Sources:
• New Hope for American Art by James Alterman
• Joseph Meierhans, Princeton Gallery of Art, 1985
• Daily Intelligencer, Doylestown, PA, 8/9/63
• Call-Chronicle, Allentown, PA, 9/28/58
• Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
In 1932, Meierhans had saved enough money from the textile business to buy a unique 52-acre property in Hagersville, Pennsylvania, about fifteen miles from New Hope. Dubbed the Meierhans Manor, amidst rolling acres of farmland sat a stately Victorian mansion surrounded by an assortment of farm structures. There, he converted a 200-foot-long chicken coop into a studio and art gallery. For the next twenty-five years he divided his time between New York and Bucks County, devoting as much time as possible to his painting. In 1957 he retired from the textile business enabling him to concentrate solely on his art. A generous man dedicated to familiarizing people with the rich local artistic tradition, Meierhans made exhibition space in his gallery available to seven other artists each year. Over the years, Ben Solowey and Katherine Steele Renninger were among the many artists to take advantage of this opportunity.
While spending all of his “painting time” in Pennsylvania, Meierhans made efforts to stay involved in the New York art scene. He exhibited in the 1940s and 1950s at the Artist’s Gallery in New York where he was the recipient of five one-man shows. Meierhans also joined the avant-garde group known as AAA (American Abstract Artists) exhibiting in New York from 1946-1957 and in as faraway places as Europe and Japan. He also exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Society of Independent Artists, the Salons of America, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Provincetown Art Association, American Federation of Artists Traveling Exchange, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo (1956), and the Crest Gallery, New Hope (solo 1958).
Sources:
• New Hope for American Art by James Alterman
• Joseph Meierhans, Princeton Gallery of Art, 1985
• Daily Intelligencer, Doylestown, PA, 8/9/63
• Call-Chronicle, Allentown, PA, 9/28/58
• Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Peter Miller The artist Peter Miller (1913-1996) was born Henrietta Myers. She changed her name to Peter shortly after concluding her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1934, believing that she would be treated more fairly if the public thought her work was created by a man rather than a woman.
Miller is today classified as an American Surrealist, a reputation that she earned for having shown in the early 1940s at the prestigious gallery of Julien Levy in New York, then considered the premiere showcase for Surrealist painting in the United States. Despite this affiliation, her worked shared little in common with the dream and fantasy world of European Surrealists, although reviewers of her exhibitions at the Julien Levy Gallery noted the unmistakable influence of the artists Joan Miró and Paul Klee.
These same reviewers observed that she was also influenced by sources in Native American art and culture, which today we know came from the fact that she divided her time between homes in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. She first came to Santa Fe as a child, but after her marriage in 1935 to Earle C. Miller, a fellow student at the Academy, she and her husband built a ranch in Española, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe (they purchased 85 acres, which allowed them to lease an additional five thousand acres from the Bureau of Land Management). From that point onward, they considered New Mexico their spiritual home. They were neighbors of the indigenous people of the Tewa Pueblo, whose crafts and religious beliefs fascinated her. The reliance of Native Americans upon the land and the animals who occupied it permeated her work for the remaining years of her career. Just as they believed that the creatures who surrounded them—birds, turtles, lizards, snakes—could serve as intermediaries in their communication with the gods of the underworld, Miller appropriated these same symbols in her paintings, along with abstract signs that she extrapolated from their pottery and petroglyphs.
Miller painted at her studio near San Ildefonso, New Mexico, as well as completing works on her farm in Pennsylvania. The Peyton Wright Gallery exhibits of 2021 and 2022 ("Coming Home" and "Coming Home Again") drew attention to paintings from her true "spiritual home" in New Mexico. Stylistically, reviewers of Miller's exhibition at the Julien Levy gallery in the 1940s noted a reference to the works of Miró, Klee and Picasso, further recognizing her themes/subjects were drawn from sources in Native American art and culture. This rapport existed because of Miller’s intimate familiarity with the customs, rituals and ceremonies of the Tewa, to which she was given unique access through her friendship with Tilano Montoya Martinez, a Native American from the San Ildefonso Pueblo who was the companion of the writer Edith Warner, one of Peter Miller’s closest friends living in New Mexico at the time.
Until recently, Peter Miller had been yet another undiscovered figure within the history of American modernism; a lacuna the 2021 exhibition "Coming Home" rectified with wide critical acclaim and numerous acquisitions by collectors and curators alike. This continued exposure will draw her paintings to the attention of a whole new generation of critics, curators, historians, and collectors, finally giving her the recognition and critical acclaim she and her work rightly deserve.
2021 Albuquerque Journal - Exhibition Preview by Kathaleen Roberts
Pasatiempo - 2021 Exhibition Preview by Michael Abatemarco
Miller is today classified as an American Surrealist, a reputation that she earned for having shown in the early 1940s at the prestigious gallery of Julien Levy in New York, then considered the premiere showcase for Surrealist painting in the United States. Despite this affiliation, her worked shared little in common with the dream and fantasy world of European Surrealists, although reviewers of her exhibitions at the Julien Levy Gallery noted the unmistakable influence of the artists Joan Miró and Paul Klee.
These same reviewers observed that she was also influenced by sources in Native American art and culture, which today we know came from the fact that she divided her time between homes in Pennsylvania and New Mexico. She first came to Santa Fe as a child, but after her marriage in 1935 to Earle C. Miller, a fellow student at the Academy, she and her husband built a ranch in Española, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe (they purchased 85 acres, which allowed them to lease an additional five thousand acres from the Bureau of Land Management). From that point onward, they considered New Mexico their spiritual home. They were neighbors of the indigenous people of the Tewa Pueblo, whose crafts and religious beliefs fascinated her. The reliance of Native Americans upon the land and the animals who occupied it permeated her work for the remaining years of her career. Just as they believed that the creatures who surrounded them—birds, turtles, lizards, snakes—could serve as intermediaries in their communication with the gods of the underworld, Miller appropriated these same symbols in her paintings, along with abstract signs that she extrapolated from their pottery and petroglyphs.
Miller painted at her studio near San Ildefonso, New Mexico, as well as completing works on her farm in Pennsylvania. The Peyton Wright Gallery exhibits of 2021 and 2022 ("Coming Home" and "Coming Home Again") drew attention to paintings from her true "spiritual home" in New Mexico. Stylistically, reviewers of Miller's exhibition at the Julien Levy gallery in the 1940s noted a reference to the works of Miró, Klee and Picasso, further recognizing her themes/subjects were drawn from sources in Native American art and culture. This rapport existed because of Miller’s intimate familiarity with the customs, rituals and ceremonies of the Tewa, to which she was given unique access through her friendship with Tilano Montoya Martinez, a Native American from the San Ildefonso Pueblo who was the companion of the writer Edith Warner, one of Peter Miller’s closest friends living in New Mexico at the time.
Until recently, Peter Miller had been yet another undiscovered figure within the history of American modernism; a lacuna the 2021 exhibition "Coming Home" rectified with wide critical acclaim and numerous acquisitions by collectors and curators alike. This continued exposure will draw her paintings to the attention of a whole new generation of critics, curators, historians, and collectors, finally giving her the recognition and critical acclaim she and her work rightly deserve.
2021 Albuquerque Journal - Exhibition Preview by Kathaleen Roberts
Pasatiempo - 2021 Exhibition Preview by Michael Abatemarco
Paulette Morelli Paulette Morelli Gargoulaud, born in 1923 in Paris, is a painter known for her abstract-impressionistic acrylic landscape and genre paintings. Portraying the moods of the Maryland countryside and ballet performances using color and texture, Morelli’s works contain free-flowing geometric forms and three-dimensional illusions.
Morelli studied her craft at L’Academie de Paris, received a Bachelor of Science degree, and subsequently moved to the Washington, DC area where she continued to pursue painting. Her work has been featured at such respectable institutions as the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD.
Artist Statement: “Instead of redefining nature, art should become a nature of its own, which reflects the imagination, creativity and philosophy of the artist.
Art should be accepted by the viewer in its pure esthetic form lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience and for those with the vision to perceive it as such, it is an exciting and uplifting spiritual experiment in visual consciousness.
It is my desire to continue the search toward creating art connected to deep human feeling and seek true meaning, conveying my emotions; not to be sidetracked by what has been done in the past by imitating or reinterpreting.
I envision a work of art becoming a new visual experience, an icon of pure contemplation, embodying the spiritual essence of fundamental esthetics.”
Biographical Sources: US Department of State, @galeria1951
Morelli studied her craft at L’Academie de Paris, received a Bachelor of Science degree, and subsequently moved to the Washington, DC area where she continued to pursue painting. Her work has been featured at such respectable institutions as the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD.
Artist Statement: “Instead of redefining nature, art should become a nature of its own, which reflects the imagination, creativity and philosophy of the artist.
Art should be accepted by the viewer in its pure esthetic form lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience and for those with the vision to perceive it as such, it is an exciting and uplifting spiritual experiment in visual consciousness.
It is my desire to continue the search toward creating art connected to deep human feeling and seek true meaning, conveying my emotions; not to be sidetracked by what has been done in the past by imitating or reinterpreting.
I envision a work of art becoming a new visual experience, an icon of pure contemplation, embodying the spiritual essence of fundamental esthetics.”
Biographical Sources: US Department of State, @galeria1951
Robert Motherwell American painter, Robert Motherwell, was one of the founders and principal exponents of Abstract Expressionism, who was among the first American artists to cultivate accidental elements in his work. A precocious youth, Motherwell received a scholarship to study art when he was 11 years old. He preferred academic studies, however, and eventually took degrees in aesthetics from Stanford and Harvard universities.
Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only in 1941. Although he was especially influenced by the Surrealist artists; Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson; he remained largely self-taught. His early work followed no single style, but already contained motifs from which much of his later art grew.
Motherwell decided to become a serious artist only in 1941. Although he was especially influenced by the Surrealist artists; Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and André Masson; he remained largely self-taught. His early work followed no single style, but already contained motifs from which much of his later art grew.
Lloyd Moylan From St. Paul, Minnesota, Lloyd Moylan was a painter who specialized in Southwest Native American subjects. He was also a museum curator and muralist whose work is in the Museum of New Mexico and the Penrose Public Library.
Moylan studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Students League in New York, and the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. From 1929 to 1931, he taught at the Broadmoor Academy, and he later became curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe (now, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian). From the time he attended the Broadmoor Academy, he made numerous trips into Arizona and New Mexico, where he sketched and painted the Hispanic and Native American population.
Moylan studied at the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Art Students League in New York, and the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs. From 1929 to 1931, he taught at the Broadmoor Academy, and he later became curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe (now, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian). From the time he attended the Broadmoor Academy, he made numerous trips into Arizona and New Mexico, where he sketched and painted the Hispanic and Native American population.
Helmuth Naumer Known for his New Mexico landscape paintings, Helmuth Naumer worked in pastel, watercolor and oil but loved pastel the most because he didn't have to mix the paints nor worry about the color fading with time. For him, pastel was the most effective for catching the fleeting changes in atmosphere in the Southwest landscape. His paintings are generally composites of landscapes and not realistic depictions of a particular place.
John Opper Academically trained like many of his contemporaries, Opper came to New York in 1934, two years after his graduation from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By 1937 Opper had become familiar with modernism, though he was not yet converted to the cause. In time, he became known as an Abstract Expressionist, a painter of large canvases in which vertical bands of varying widths pulsed with color. His gesture was controlled, yet dynamic; his overlays of color luminous and tactile. In these works, and in field paintings in which clouds of color seem to float against soft grounds, he strengthened his commitment to "painting as painting" that he first developed as a Hofmann student.
Arthur Osver In 1940, Arthur Osver settled in New York's Greenwich Village and went on to teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and then Columbia University. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1952, and he visited Italy and France a number of times throughout that decade. He also taught at Yale University and Cooper Union in New York in the late 1950s.
Osver came to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960, serving as Professor of Art at Washington University until his retirement in 1981. He was the third high-profile artist attracted to the university by Dean Kenneth Hudson, who also hired Max Beckmann and Philip Guston.
Paintings by Osver appear in private collections and museums all over the world. Museum collectors include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
A retrospective exhibition of Osver's work was held at The Saint Louis Art Museum in March 2000. Known for painterly abstractions in glorious colors, Osver's latest body of work includes a new timely element: text from graphics and newsprint.
Osver came to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960, serving as Professor of Art at Washington University until his retirement in 1981. He was the third high-profile artist attracted to the university by Dean Kenneth Hudson, who also hired Max Beckmann and Philip Guston.
Paintings by Osver appear in private collections and museums all over the world. Museum collectors include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
A retrospective exhibition of Osver's work was held at The Saint Louis Art Museum in March 2000. Known for painterly abstractions in glorious colors, Osver's latest body of work includes a new timely element: text from graphics and newsprint.
Emmy Lou Packard Emmy Lou Packard was born in California in 1914. Her father, Walter Packard, was an internationally known agronomist. In 1927, taking his family with him, he went to Mexico City as a consultant on the government's historic land reform program.
There, Ms. Packard, who drew and painted precociously at the age of 13, was taken by her mother to meet muralist Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Rivera later recalled the beauty of the little girl ``with the face of a French Gothic angel plucked from the reliefs of Chartres.'' When he came to San Francisco to do a fresco for the Treasure Island World's Fair in 1940 (now at City College of San Francisco), she was his full-time assistant and painted side by side with him on many areas of the 1,650-square-foot mural.
By then, Ms. Packard was a full- fledged artist who had studied from 1932 to 1936 at UC Berkeley, where she was art editor of the Daily Californian, the student newspaper, and of Occident, the campus literary magazine. She was also the first female editor of the Pelican, the humor magazine.
There, Ms. Packard, who drew and painted precociously at the age of 13, was taken by her mother to meet muralist Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Rivera later recalled the beauty of the little girl ``with the face of a French Gothic angel plucked from the reliefs of Chartres.'' When he came to San Francisco to do a fresco for the Treasure Island World's Fair in 1940 (now at City College of San Francisco), she was his full-time assistant and painted side by side with him on many areas of the 1,650-square-foot mural.
By then, Ms. Packard was a full- fledged artist who had studied from 1932 to 1936 at UC Berkeley, where she was art editor of the Daily Californian, the student newspaper, and of Occident, the campus literary magazine. She was also the first female editor of the Pelican, the humor magazine.
John Pearson bio pending
Agnes Pelton Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) was born to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany. After her father died in 1890, she and her mother moved to Brooklyn, New York, where her mother taught piano lessons, as well as German and French. Young Agnes learned piano from her mother, and at age 14 began taking art classes at Pratt Institute. After graduating at age 19, she continued studying with two of her instructors, Arthur Wesley Dow and Hamilton Easter Field. She studied landscape painting with Dow, who emphasized structure, spirit, imagination, creation, and the non-naturalistic use of color, a technique he taught using Japanese prints to demonstrate space relations and the appropriate use of light and dark masses. Dow believed that the Japanese and the Chinese had already found the essence of the painting ideals that Modernism was still striving to achieve. Dow’s influence was critical to Pelton’s development of abstractions based on interior, spiritual values.
Pelton traveled to Italy for a year in 1910, where Field, also an enthusiast of oriental art, was residing. Under his guidance she studied Italian painters and did daily life drawing at the British Academy in Rome. Liberated by her studies, in 1911 she began what she called “Imaginative Paintings,” which were influenced by outdoor explorations of the effects of natural light, and continued through 1917. At a 1912 exhibition of Pelton’s recent paintings at Field’s studio in Ogunquit, Maine, Walt Kuhn was introduced to her work. Kuhn, the organizer of the Armory Show of 1913, invited her to exhibit two of her “Imaginative Paintings” in that landmark exhibition: Vine Wood and Stone Age.
Pelton made New York City her home until 1921, but her need for solitude finally prompted her to find a rural environment, and she moved to Long Island. It was here in the winter of 1926 that she created her first original abstractions. She also began, during this time, to use notebooks to record her most personal thoughts on life and spiritual issues. From 1921 to 1932 Pelton traveled to Hawaii, New Hampshire, Beirut, Syria, Georgia, and Pasadena, finally relocating in Cathedral City outside of Palm Springs, California, where she remained for the rest of her life.
In the mid-1930s, Pelton became a founding member of a group of artists known as the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). The TPG manifesto stated that their purpose was “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” The manifesto included the statement that “the work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems.” Arranging exhibitions of transcendental work that would “serve to widen the horizon of art” became the focus of the TPG’s activity.
Pelton was also deeply influenced by literature, and especially the Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Many of her paintings, in fact, have an accompanying poem that Pelton wrote herself, revealing elements of her inspiration for the images. She also read the esoteric and spiritualist writings of Madame Blavatsky on Theosophy and Occultism. A deeply spiritual person, Pelton’s life revolved around William Blake’s belief that “the Imagination is not a State: it is Human Existence itself.” As a person, Pelton was small, quiet, and described as “someone special” and having a “beautiful soul.” She believed that despite its many conflicts, the world was a place of kindness and grace.
Although Pelton's art had received some recognition, she remained relatively obscure on the national level until the 1995-1996 tour of a retrospective exhibition of her work, entitled "Agnes Pelton, Poet of Nature," which was curated by Michael Zakian. Pelton died just before she turned eighty and was cremated, leaving this world through the element of fire. Throughout her painting career, she had continued to express the spiritual in art and the possibilities within human reach.
Her work is found in numerous museums around the country, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Honolulu Museum of Art; University of New Mexico Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Palm Springs Art Museum; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; San Diego Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; New Mexico Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art.
Pelton traveled to Italy for a year in 1910, where Field, also an enthusiast of oriental art, was residing. Under his guidance she studied Italian painters and did daily life drawing at the British Academy in Rome. Liberated by her studies, in 1911 she began what she called “Imaginative Paintings,” which were influenced by outdoor explorations of the effects of natural light, and continued through 1917. At a 1912 exhibition of Pelton’s recent paintings at Field’s studio in Ogunquit, Maine, Walt Kuhn was introduced to her work. Kuhn, the organizer of the Armory Show of 1913, invited her to exhibit two of her “Imaginative Paintings” in that landmark exhibition: Vine Wood and Stone Age.
Pelton made New York City her home until 1921, but her need for solitude finally prompted her to find a rural environment, and she moved to Long Island. It was here in the winter of 1926 that she created her first original abstractions. She also began, during this time, to use notebooks to record her most personal thoughts on life and spiritual issues. From 1921 to 1932 Pelton traveled to Hawaii, New Hampshire, Beirut, Syria, Georgia, and Pasadena, finally relocating in Cathedral City outside of Palm Springs, California, where she remained for the rest of her life.
In the mid-1930s, Pelton became a founding member of a group of artists known as the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). The TPG manifesto stated that their purpose was “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” The manifesto included the statement that “the work does not concern itself with political, economic, or other social problems.” Arranging exhibitions of transcendental work that would “serve to widen the horizon of art” became the focus of the TPG’s activity.
Pelton was also deeply influenced by literature, and especially the Romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Many of her paintings, in fact, have an accompanying poem that Pelton wrote herself, revealing elements of her inspiration for the images. She also read the esoteric and spiritualist writings of Madame Blavatsky on Theosophy and Occultism. A deeply spiritual person, Pelton’s life revolved around William Blake’s belief that “the Imagination is not a State: it is Human Existence itself.” As a person, Pelton was small, quiet, and described as “someone special” and having a “beautiful soul.” She believed that despite its many conflicts, the world was a place of kindness and grace.
Although Pelton's art had received some recognition, she remained relatively obscure on the national level until the 1995-1996 tour of a retrospective exhibition of her work, entitled "Agnes Pelton, Poet of Nature," which was curated by Michael Zakian. Pelton died just before she turned eighty and was cremated, leaving this world through the element of fire. Throughout her painting career, she had continued to express the spiritual in art and the possibilities within human reach.
Her work is found in numerous museums around the country, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Honolulu Museum of Art; University of New Mexico Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Palm Springs Art Museum; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; San Diego Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; New Mexico Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art.
Helen (Barchilon) Redman Helen Redman, MFA, is an internationally exhibited figurative painter, mixed media artist, teacher, feminist commentator and grandmother, exploring personal identity, gender stereotypes, health issues, and cycles of life in the expressive tradition of Alice Neel and Frida Kahlo.
For over six decades, her work has centered on life passages — including pregnancy, mothering, illness, healing, and the death of a child, and on various stages of her children’s growth. Redman, who was born in 1940, has focused in recent years on exploring women’s journey through menopause and old age and contradicting the negativity provoked by aging in a sexist and youth oriented culture.
Redman was previously known as Helen Barchilon (married to Jacques Barchilon from 1960-1973).
She has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Iowa, and has lectured and exhibited her art across the United States.
She has been an active force for gaining support and recognition for women in the Arts, co-founding Front Range Women in the Visual Arts in Boulder, Colorado in 1974 and the San Diego Women’s Caucus for the Arts in 1992. Redman is also part of the first online digital archive dedicated solely to feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Redman’s art is included in the following permanent collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami; San Diego Museum of Art, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, University of Colorado Collections, Boulder; Women’s Museum of California, San Diego, Cornell Fine Art Museum, Winter Park, Florida, and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.
biographical sources: helenredman.com, Brooklyn Museum, dontshutup2021
For over six decades, her work has centered on life passages — including pregnancy, mothering, illness, healing, and the death of a child, and on various stages of her children’s growth. Redman, who was born in 1940, has focused in recent years on exploring women’s journey through menopause and old age and contradicting the negativity provoked by aging in a sexist and youth oriented culture.
Redman was previously known as Helen Barchilon (married to Jacques Barchilon from 1960-1973).
She has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Iowa, and has lectured and exhibited her art across the United States.
She has been an active force for gaining support and recognition for women in the Arts, co-founding Front Range Women in the Visual Arts in Boulder, Colorado in 1974 and the San Diego Women’s Caucus for the Arts in 1992. Redman is also part of the first online digital archive dedicated solely to feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Redman’s art is included in the following permanent collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami; San Diego Museum of Art, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, University of Colorado Collections, Boulder; Women’s Museum of California, San Diego, Cornell Fine Art Museum, Winter Park, Florida, and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.
biographical sources: helenredman.com, Brooklyn Museum, dontshutup2021
Doel Reed Born in Logansport, Indiana, Doel Reed was raised in Indianapolis. He originally studied and worked in architecture but his interest in art led him to enroll in the Cincinnati Art Academy in 1916. His studies were interrupted the following year when he left for France to serve in Word War I. Following his discharge in 1919, he returned to the Art Academy where he studied for another year. While at the Academy, Reed studied under James R. Hopkins, H.H. Wessel, and L.H. Meaken. It was under L.H. Meaken that Reed had his first, and only, formal training in the graphic arts. The artist developed an interest in the medium after he observed Meaken print from the plates of Frank Duveneck. By the 1950s Reed was considered to be a premier printmaker and was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design for graphic arts in 1952. In addition to printmaking, Reed worked regularly in several mediums including oil and casein.
Paul Allen Reed A prominent member of the Washington Color School - a group of Color Field painters who worked and exhibited in Washington, D.C.’s avant-garde art scene in the second half of the 20th century - Paul Reed was born in Washington, D.C. He studied at San Diego State College and the Corcoran School of Art. Throughout the 1940s, Reed worked in New York City as an illustrator of magazines and designer of advertisements.
While in New York, Reed visited museums and galleries, becoming acquainted with New York Abstract Expressionists and Action Painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In 1950, Reed returned to Washington to start his own graphic design business. Through his childhood friend, Gene Davis, Reed became acquainted with the works of the artists at the Washington Workshop for the Arts, including Jacob Kainen and Kenneth Noland. He also formed friendships with fellow Color Painters Tom Downing and Howard Mehring, who introduced Reed to the work of their Washington Workshop mentor, Morris Louis.
Reed’s early paintings are highly gestural and expressionistic in style, similar to Davis’ early work. In the late 1950s, he encountered the technique of staining raw canvas with pigment – a technique made possible by the invention of water based acrylic paint and becoming increasingly popular with Louis and his Color School colleagues. Reed began staining in 1959.
Over the next several decades, his work evolved through a variety of forms and compositional structures, each designed as a vehicle for the expression of ‘pure color’.
Like Mehring, Reed believed in the use of precise geometrical form as the best vehicle for the exploration of color. Reed’s best-known works employ stripes, grids or curvilinear shapes filled with luminous, transparent colors in delicate hues that overlap and bleed into one another. Throughout his career, Reed also experimented with a variety of other artistic media, including welded sculpture, photography, and print-making. From 1962 - 1972, he served as Art Director for the Peace Corps. In 1973, he began teaching at the Corcoran School of Art.
Reed began exhibiting in the 1960s at a number of Washington galleries, including the Corcoran Gallery, the Washington Gallery of Art, Jefferson Place Gallery, and Adams ‐ Morgan Gallery. A number of his works were included in Gerald Nordland’s 1964 ‘Washington Color Painters’ exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art. His works have been exhibited in a variety of prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Phoenix Art Museum. He is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
He died at his home in Phoenix in 2015 at the age of 96.
Sources & Further Reading:
Washington Gallery of Modern Art. The Washington Color Painters. 1965. Humblet, Claudine. The New American Abstraction 1950-¬‐ 1970. Italy: Skira, 2007.
While in New York, Reed visited museums and galleries, becoming acquainted with New York Abstract Expressionists and Action Painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In 1950, Reed returned to Washington to start his own graphic design business. Through his childhood friend, Gene Davis, Reed became acquainted with the works of the artists at the Washington Workshop for the Arts, including Jacob Kainen and Kenneth Noland. He also formed friendships with fellow Color Painters Tom Downing and Howard Mehring, who introduced Reed to the work of their Washington Workshop mentor, Morris Louis.
Reed’s early paintings are highly gestural and expressionistic in style, similar to Davis’ early work. In the late 1950s, he encountered the technique of staining raw canvas with pigment – a technique made possible by the invention of water based acrylic paint and becoming increasingly popular with Louis and his Color School colleagues. Reed began staining in 1959.
Over the next several decades, his work evolved through a variety of forms and compositional structures, each designed as a vehicle for the expression of ‘pure color’.
Like Mehring, Reed believed in the use of precise geometrical form as the best vehicle for the exploration of color. Reed’s best-known works employ stripes, grids or curvilinear shapes filled with luminous, transparent colors in delicate hues that overlap and bleed into one another. Throughout his career, Reed also experimented with a variety of other artistic media, including welded sculpture, photography, and print-making. From 1962 - 1972, he served as Art Director for the Peace Corps. In 1973, he began teaching at the Corcoran School of Art.
Reed began exhibiting in the 1960s at a number of Washington galleries, including the Corcoran Gallery, the Washington Gallery of Art, Jefferson Place Gallery, and Adams ‐ Morgan Gallery. A number of his works were included in Gerald Nordland’s 1964 ‘Washington Color Painters’ exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Art. His works have been exhibited in a variety of prominent museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Phoenix Art Museum. He is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
He died at his home in Phoenix in 2015 at the age of 96.
Sources & Further Reading:
Washington Gallery of Modern Art. The Washington Color Painters. 1965. Humblet, Claudine. The New American Abstraction 1950-¬‐ 1970. Italy: Skira, 2007.
Roland Reiss Roland Reiss’ practice as an artist spanned Abstract Expressionism, the plastic arts, and representational painting.
Best known for his dioramas of the 1970s and ’80s - Plexiglass-encased miniature sculpture assemblages examining the human condition and modern American culture - Reiss investigated various modes of making as he became enchanted by them, and remained a prolific artist on the cutting edge to the end of his life. For the last twenty years he was almost exclusively painting large, stylized flowers in works that critic James Scarborough described as “not still lives but Vanitas paintings for a digital age.”
Born in Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, Reiss moved with his family to Pomona, California during World War II. After attending the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he graduated from Mt. San Antonio College in Pomona and was forthwith drafted into the army during the Korean War, where he oversaw forty artists working at the Camp Roberts base in Central California. Shortly after he and fellow artist Robert Irwin won an Army prize, Reiss saw his orders to transfer to active combat in Korea canceled. On his return to civilian life, Reiss enrolled in UCLA on the GI bill, earning his MA in art in 1956.
That same year, Reiss took a job teaching painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he brought Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Nancy Graves, and Hilton Kramer to teach summer courses. In 1971 he returned to California, where he headed the graduate art program at Claremont Graduate University for thirty years, implementing a community-minded approach that brought national recognition to the program. An endowed chair in art was established in his name at the university in 2010.
Over the course of his widely varied sixty-year career, Reiss exhibited work at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and Documenta 7 1982). He received fourteen solo museum exhibitions, among them The Dancing Lessons: 12 Sculptures (1977) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). A 2014 retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at Cal State Fullerton highlighted his career of continual self-reinvention.
His works are held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum, all in Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, among others.
He also received four National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships for both painting and sculpture.
Writing in the pages of Artforum in 1977, critic Peter Clothier compared Reiss’s dioramas to the “disnarrative” novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. “The viewer’s participation, then, is not simply that of putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (whose final piece may be missing), since all the necessary elements are present. The process is rather one of continuing reconstitution, with the realization that each reconstituted structure is a provisional one,” wrote Clothier. “Beyond the fantasy of the work, it thus becomes a model for our experience of reality itself.”
He died on December 13, 2020, in Los Angeles at the age of 91.
biographical sources: Artforum, Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Best known for his dioramas of the 1970s and ’80s - Plexiglass-encased miniature sculpture assemblages examining the human condition and modern American culture - Reiss investigated various modes of making as he became enchanted by them, and remained a prolific artist on the cutting edge to the end of his life. For the last twenty years he was almost exclusively painting large, stylized flowers in works that critic James Scarborough described as “not still lives but Vanitas paintings for a digital age.”
Born in Chicago at the height of the Great Depression, Reiss moved with his family to Pomona, California during World War II. After attending the American Academy of Art in Chicago, he graduated from Mt. San Antonio College in Pomona and was forthwith drafted into the army during the Korean War, where he oversaw forty artists working at the Camp Roberts base in Central California. Shortly after he and fellow artist Robert Irwin won an Army prize, Reiss saw his orders to transfer to active combat in Korea canceled. On his return to civilian life, Reiss enrolled in UCLA on the GI bill, earning his MA in art in 1956.
That same year, Reiss took a job teaching painting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he brought Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Brown, Nancy Graves, and Hilton Kramer to teach summer courses. In 1971 he returned to California, where he headed the graduate art program at Claremont Graduate University for thirty years, implementing a community-minded approach that brought national recognition to the program. An endowed chair in art was established in his name at the university in 2010.
Over the course of his widely varied sixty-year career, Reiss exhibited work at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and Documenta 7 1982). He received fourteen solo museum exhibitions, among them The Dancing Lessons: 12 Sculptures (1977) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). A 2014 retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at Cal State Fullerton highlighted his career of continual self-reinvention.
His works are held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Hammer Museum, all in Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, among others.
He also received four National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowships for both painting and sculpture.
Writing in the pages of Artforum in 1977, critic Peter Clothier compared Reiss’s dioramas to the “disnarrative” novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. “The viewer’s participation, then, is not simply that of putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (whose final piece may be missing), since all the necessary elements are present. The process is rather one of continuing reconstitution, with the realization that each reconstituted structure is a provisional one,” wrote Clothier. “Beyond the fantasy of the work, it thus becomes a model for our experience of reality itself.”
He died on December 13, 2020, in Los Angeles at the age of 91.
biographical sources: Artforum, Diane Rosenstein Gallery
Horacio Rentería Rocha Horacio Rentería Rocha was born on the 21st of October 1912, under poor conditions, in the district of Analco of the Mexican city Victoria de Durango, where he later completed elementary and middle school. Already as a child, Horacio Rentería Rocha has painted rustic landscapes and faces on faded house facades of his hometown. Preferably, he painted in his infantile creative period with clay, lime, and pieces of burnt coal.
As a young artist Horacio Rentería Rocha became a student of the famous painter William de Lourdes. From his teacher he learned how to prepare the materials for wall paintings/murals and how to make use of these special diluted colors. When the depictions/ murals in the Government Palace of Durango were designed in 1935, Horacio Rentería Rocha was the main assistant to his famous teacher. The wonderful wall painting/mural on the first floor of the Palace with the title 'With open arms the country protects the people' was painted by Horacio Rentería Rocha along with William de Lourdes.
In 1936 Horacio Rentería Rocha was commissioned to upgrade the artistic value of the inner courtyard at the majestic Palace of Government in Durango. On each pillar, he designed a coat of arms from municipalities of the State of Durango. In addition, he painted at this time with the support of his loyal way companion Rodrigo D'avalos, draughtsman and watercolorist from Durango, a mural in the children's school "Challito Perez Gavilin" in Durango. A year later he was authorized to paint a mural under application of the style which he learned from his teacher and well-known painter William de Lourdes, in the garden of the children's School of the 18th of March in the town of Gomez Palacio. During his occupation as a teacher, he produced several murals in this institution. He created frescoes of unique beauty - some of them with legendary themes such as 'Red Riding Hood' based on the story by Charles Perrault, Miguel des Cervantes's "Don Quixote" and others of children and their surrounding environments. The children and their lifestyles were thematic precursors of what later labelled him and made the famous Latin American artist.
Horacio Rentería Rocha exhibited his paintings 1943 in the town of Gomez in the gallery for art decoration. His oil paintings are mostly small panels representing idealized and magnificently dressed children. Typically, these are surrounded by beautiful Mexican cultural objects such as for example Piñatas. Pets, especially dogs and cats, are also frequently depicted with the children in the oil paintings. This is shown in his works with the children at their most beautiful moments of the game. Often, the magnificently dressed children are embedded in romantic landscapes. The composition of human figures within beautiful regional landscapes often occurs and gives his paintings a homely touch/soul. Especially mountains, hills, volcanoes, striking buildings such as churches and streets of his domestic surroundings/life were artistically included. The traditional customs of the people play a special role in his paintings and convey unity between tradition, social customs and human beings. Horacio Rentería Rocha had a passion for light, clean lines and shapes which are mirrored in his landscape paintings. His vision of a pure nature with children in magnificent costumes from their cultural heritage away from the constraints of modern civilization with its excitement and joy, is reflected by the high-contrast clarity in his paintings.
In 1948 Horacio Rentería Rocha met an art dealer who bought all of his existing and later created works of art. These were offered abroad as works of the 19th century. The art dealer honored Horacio Rentería Rocha's works with hardly a peso and made sure to include the specific clause, that Horacio Rentería Rocha has to stay anonymous as a painter of such works by making his signature illegible. The works, which were sold by the dealer at very high prices, were soon appreciated worldwide. Horacio Rentería Rocha did not benefit at all from this, but was fobbed off with some few pesos and exploited in the truest sense of the word. Especially in New York and Paris the works of Horacio Rentería Rocha became well known and famous as "The children of Horacio".
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As a young artist Horacio Rentería Rocha became a student of the famous painter William de Lourdes. From his teacher he learned how to prepare the materials for wall paintings/murals and how to make use of these special diluted colors. When the depictions/ murals in the Government Palace of Durango were designed in 1935, Horacio Rentería Rocha was the main assistant to his famous teacher. The wonderful wall painting/mural on the first floor of the Palace with the title 'With open arms the country protects the people' was painted by Horacio Rentería Rocha along with William de Lourdes.
In 1936 Horacio Rentería Rocha was commissioned to upgrade the artistic value of the inner courtyard at the majestic Palace of Government in Durango. On each pillar, he designed a coat of arms from municipalities of the State of Durango. In addition, he painted at this time with the support of his loyal way companion Rodrigo D'avalos, draughtsman and watercolorist from Durango, a mural in the children's school "Challito Perez Gavilin" in Durango. A year later he was authorized to paint a mural under application of the style which he learned from his teacher and well-known painter William de Lourdes, in the garden of the children's School of the 18th of March in the town of Gomez Palacio. During his occupation as a teacher, he produced several murals in this institution. He created frescoes of unique beauty - some of them with legendary themes such as 'Red Riding Hood' based on the story by Charles Perrault, Miguel des Cervantes's "Don Quixote" and others of children and their surrounding environments. The children and their lifestyles were thematic precursors of what later labelled him and made the famous Latin American artist.
Horacio Rentería Rocha exhibited his paintings 1943 in the town of Gomez in the gallery for art decoration. His oil paintings are mostly small panels representing idealized and magnificently dressed children. Typically, these are surrounded by beautiful Mexican cultural objects such as for example Piñatas. Pets, especially dogs and cats, are also frequently depicted with the children in the oil paintings. This is shown in his works with the children at their most beautiful moments of the game. Often, the magnificently dressed children are embedded in romantic landscapes. The composition of human figures within beautiful regional landscapes often occurs and gives his paintings a homely touch/soul. Especially mountains, hills, volcanoes, striking buildings such as churches and streets of his domestic surroundings/life were artistically included. The traditional customs of the people play a special role in his paintings and convey unity between tradition, social customs and human beings. Horacio Rentería Rocha had a passion for light, clean lines and shapes which are mirrored in his landscape paintings. His vision of a pure nature with children in magnificent costumes from their cultural heritage away from the constraints of modern civilization with its excitement and joy, is reflected by the high-contrast clarity in his paintings.
In 1948 Horacio Rentería Rocha met an art dealer who bought all of his existing and later created works of art. These were offered abroad as works of the 19th century. The art dealer honored Horacio Rentería Rocha's works with hardly a peso and made sure to include the specific clause, that Horacio Rentería Rocha has to stay anonymous as a painter of such works by making his signature illegible. The works, which were sold by the dealer at very high prices, were soon appreciated worldwide. Horacio Rentería Rocha did not benefit at all from this, but was fobbed off with some few pesos and exploited in the truest sense of the word. Especially in New York and Paris the works of Horacio Rentería Rocha became well known and famous as "The children of Horacio".
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Johnnie Winona Ross Johnnie Winona Ross is an acclaimed American abstract painter known for his minimalist, luminous canvases inspired by the landscape of the American Southwest.
Ross was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1971 and completed his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1973.
Before painting full-time, Ross had a distinguished career in art education. From 1977 to 1999, he taught at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, eventually serving as the chair of the Art Department. In May 1999, he resigned his academic position to dedicate himself fully to his studio practice and moved ot Taos, New Mexico.
From his New Mexico studio he explores the vocabulary of minimalism and the complexity of rendering the experience of the high desert in pure abstraction. At first glance his paintings and works on paper appear to be largely absent of color, but looking more closely the layers upon layers of subtle earthen colors reveal themselves.
While his paintings appear starkly minimalist at first glance, they feature an intricate, labor-intensive process of applying multiple layers of glazed, earth-toned pigments and minerals, then shaving the surface with a straight razor to expose underlying chronological layers of color. He finishes his work using a traditional potter's stone—a technique borrowed from ancient Pueblo pottery makers—to achieve a hard, translucent, and softly reflective sheen.
This interspersed layering of color, melding opacity and transparency, and building depth through repetition, are the integral elements of his work.
As artist and writer Kate Beck notes,
"This process of painting, scraping and repainting establishes a subliminal dynamic between counteractive elements - presence/absence, structure/freedom, resistance/release, richness/ austerity-that ultimately allows an elegant integration of romantic irony to permeate his surfaces. The viewer is quietly entranced by his purity of form, light and the suggestion of what lies beneath. This is the artist's process, his hand."
He now exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout Northern New Mexico. He has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including a Fulbright Artist in Residence and a Gottlieb Foundation Support Grant. Among the many public collections holding work by Ross are the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; the Sori Arts Center of Jeollabuk-do, Jeonbuk, Korea; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM; the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.
Biographical sources: Tamarind Institute, Lannan
Ross was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 1971 and completed his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Illinois in Champaign in 1973.
Before painting full-time, Ross had a distinguished career in art education. From 1977 to 1999, he taught at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, eventually serving as the chair of the Art Department. In May 1999, he resigned his academic position to dedicate himself fully to his studio practice and moved ot Taos, New Mexico.
From his New Mexico studio he explores the vocabulary of minimalism and the complexity of rendering the experience of the high desert in pure abstraction. At first glance his paintings and works on paper appear to be largely absent of color, but looking more closely the layers upon layers of subtle earthen colors reveal themselves.
While his paintings appear starkly minimalist at first glance, they feature an intricate, labor-intensive process of applying multiple layers of glazed, earth-toned pigments and minerals, then shaving the surface with a straight razor to expose underlying chronological layers of color. He finishes his work using a traditional potter's stone—a technique borrowed from ancient Pueblo pottery makers—to achieve a hard, translucent, and softly reflective sheen.
This interspersed layering of color, melding opacity and transparency, and building depth through repetition, are the integral elements of his work.
As artist and writer Kate Beck notes,
"This process of painting, scraping and repainting establishes a subliminal dynamic between counteractive elements - presence/absence, structure/freedom, resistance/release, richness/ austerity-that ultimately allows an elegant integration of romantic irony to permeate his surfaces. The viewer is quietly entranced by his purity of form, light and the suggestion of what lies beneath. This is the artist's process, his hand."
He now exhibits regularly in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, and throughout Northern New Mexico. He has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including a Fulbright Artist in Residence and a Gottlieb Foundation Support Grant. Among the many public collections holding work by Ross are the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; the Sori Arts Center of Jeollabuk-do, Jeonbuk, Korea; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM; the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM; the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.
Biographical sources: Tamarind Institute, Lannan
Attilio Salemme An artist who died too young – a heart attack at age forty-three – Attilio Salemme's paintings juxtapose elongated vertical rectangles in complex relationships that suggest groups of "presences," near human beings lonely in their inability to break through the artist's geometric overlay to attain human status.
Salemme was born in 1911 in a Boston suburb, the son of a sailor who also died young. Called upon to help support his mother and sister, Salemme left school, eventually joining the Marines at age sixteen in 1927.
Atillio went to Manhattan at 18 and made it his own, educating himself at the public library. For a living he held many menial jobs, including running elevators and a stint as a doorkeeper at the Guggenheim Museum. He started to think seriously of art as a career while living in the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village, though he had a conflicting interest in science. However, he vacillated between painting and writing, failing to paint a picture that struck him as “a personal statement” until he was 32.
He met his wife Lucia and other artists when he got a job as a framer in 1942 at the precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art.
In the eleven years of his life that remained, Salemme sold pictures to Manhattan’s Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern museums. He was also commissioned to paint murals for the posh Manhattan House and the old Moore-McCormack liner Argentina. Yet he was more respected than sought after; Salemme and his family stayed poor.
Salemme’s most familiar style was essentially a unique adaptation of Mondrian’s geometric approach to the representational; with what amounted almost to a T-square rigidity of line, he reduced the outlines of his figures to a compilation of rectangles and triangles, attenuated them, and then lined them up across the canvas, in a frieze-like design. His colors were almost always beautiful and bright, hence the subtlety of their effect: he pictured nightmares in the sunshine, petal-hued evils, well-scrubbed and enameled enigmas.
As the New York Times wrote in 1996, “[his figures] stand for a specific phase in the assimilation of Surrealism; these pin‐thin, near‐human figures relate to the ancient phenomenon of American loneliness.”
“Life,” Salemme once wrote, “has infinite doors to beckon with, and each day reveals new doors, and men continue to pass through new doors, and we live in an age when men are no longer content with discovering new doors, but have begun to close them and erect them around themselves. But there is no escape from the door that all doors lead to.”
Salemme died in 1955, and while not a major artist, his paintings were acknowledged for their surreal and metaphysical uniqueness. They may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Salemme was born in 1911 in a Boston suburb, the son of a sailor who also died young. Called upon to help support his mother and sister, Salemme left school, eventually joining the Marines at age sixteen in 1927.
Atillio went to Manhattan at 18 and made it his own, educating himself at the public library. For a living he held many menial jobs, including running elevators and a stint as a doorkeeper at the Guggenheim Museum. He started to think seriously of art as a career while living in the artistic milieu of Greenwich Village, though he had a conflicting interest in science. However, he vacillated between painting and writing, failing to paint a picture that struck him as “a personal statement” until he was 32.
He met his wife Lucia and other artists when he got a job as a framer in 1942 at the precursor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Objective Art.
In the eleven years of his life that remained, Salemme sold pictures to Manhattan’s Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern museums. He was also commissioned to paint murals for the posh Manhattan House and the old Moore-McCormack liner Argentina. Yet he was more respected than sought after; Salemme and his family stayed poor.
Salemme’s most familiar style was essentially a unique adaptation of Mondrian’s geometric approach to the representational; with what amounted almost to a T-square rigidity of line, he reduced the outlines of his figures to a compilation of rectangles and triangles, attenuated them, and then lined them up across the canvas, in a frieze-like design. His colors were almost always beautiful and bright, hence the subtlety of their effect: he pictured nightmares in the sunshine, petal-hued evils, well-scrubbed and enameled enigmas.
As the New York Times wrote in 1996, “[his figures] stand for a specific phase in the assimilation of Surrealism; these pin‐thin, near‐human figures relate to the ancient phenomenon of American loneliness.”
“Life,” Salemme once wrote, “has infinite doors to beckon with, and each day reveals new doors, and men continue to pass through new doors, and we live in an age when men are no longer content with discovering new doors, but have begun to close them and erect them around themselves. But there is no escape from the door that all doors lead to.”
Salemme died in 1955, and while not a major artist, his paintings were acknowledged for their surreal and metaphysical uniqueness. They may be found in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Rolph Scarlett Canadian artist Rolph Scarlett had a remarkable career, as a painter, designer and creator of unique jewelry. He was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1889. When he moved to the United States in 1918, he had gained experience in the techniques of painting, execution of jewelry settings and designing for the stage. Each of these interests helped shape his career.
Scarlett's dedication to Modernism was expressed in his art and design work. Although Scarlett also created action paintings and surrealist works, he especially loved and was devoted to geometric abstract non-objective painting. Before the end of his nearly 75-year career, Scarlett had returned to geometric abstraction with a greatly brightened palette and a denser composition than used in his earlier work. His commitment to abstraction never wavered and he continued to explore it, until his death at age 94.
Scarlett's dedication to Modernism was expressed in his art and design work. Although Scarlett also created action paintings and surrealist works, he especially loved and was devoted to geometric abstract non-objective painting. Before the end of his nearly 75-year career, Scarlett had returned to geometric abstraction with a greatly brightened palette and a denser composition than used in his earlier work. His commitment to abstraction never wavered and he continued to explore it, until his death at age 94.
Alice Schille Alice Schille, an American watercolorist and painter, was born in Columbus, Ohio and attended the Columbus Art School beginning in 1891, and studied at the Art Students League of New York on a scholarship under William Merritt Chase. There she studied figure drawing with Kenyon Cox. In 1894 she went to Europe and remained there until 1900, later traveling extensively in the United States, Morocco, Egypt and abroad. For years she taught at the Columbus Art School, retiring in 1948.
Schille won the gold medal at the 1915 annual watercolor exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, along with many other honors throughout her lifetime. Scholar James Keny notes in his excerpt on Schille in the Encyclopedia of the Midwest that in 1909 "Schille exhibited some of the first examples of Pointillism by an American artists at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts."
Schille won the gold medal at the 1915 annual watercolor exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, along with many other honors throughout her lifetime. Scholar James Keny notes in his excerpt on Schille in the Encyclopedia of the Midwest that in 1909 "Schille exhibited some of the first examples of Pointillism by an American artists at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts."
Howard Behling Schleeter Howard Schleeter was born in 1903; the son of a commercial artist. He studied formally at the Albright Art School in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. However, his studies at Albright were brief and the artist considered himself to be primarily self-taught. He later met Charles Lindbergh while working as an airplane mechanic. However, he soon chose to make his living entirely as an artist and, in 1929, he traveled to New Mexico. The following year he married and the couple made New Mexico their permanent home.
Schleeter studied under Brooks Willis during the 1930s and worked in several mediums including gouache, watercolor, oil, scratchboard and engraving. The Great Depression took its toll on Schleeter who occasionally found work digging ditches to make ends meet.
In 1936, his financial status greatly improved when he received the first of several commissions from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Though he worked primarily in abstraction, the five murals he completed for a WPA commission in the Melrose Public School library are realistic depictions of the West. He worked on several more New Deal commissions during the years of 1936 and 1942 in locations including Santa Fe, Clayton, and Washington D.C. During this time, Schleeter furthered his income by teaching at a Las Vegas, New Mexico art gallery during 1938 and 1939.
In 1945, the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to Schleeter as “an artist’s artist.” He also received local attention when he became one of the first artists chosen by Peter Hurd and Jane Mabry for his significant contributions to New Mexico’s art. Schleeter taught at the University of New Mexico during 1950-1951 and 1954.
Exhibited: Kansas Art Institute, 1936-1938; New Mexico State Fair, 1939 (prize); New Mexico Art League, 1939 (prize); Cedar City, New Mexico, 1941-1946; Philadelphia Artist Alliance, 1945 (solo); deYoung Memorial Museum, 1946; Art Institute of Chicago, 1947; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 1951 (purchase prize), 1955 (purchase prize); Vienna, Austria, 1952; Guggenheim Museum, 1954; Karlsruhe Museum, Germany, 1955; Stanford University, 1955 (solo); New Mexico Highlands University, 1957 (purchase prize); Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1958; Swope Art Gallery Works Held: A&M College, New Mexico (mural); Art League of New Mexico; Cedar City Institute of Religion; Encyclopedia Britannica; Miners Hospital, Raton, New Mexico (mural); Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Research Studio, Maitland, Florida; University of New Mexico.
Schleeter studied under Brooks Willis during the 1930s and worked in several mediums including gouache, watercolor, oil, scratchboard and engraving. The Great Depression took its toll on Schleeter who occasionally found work digging ditches to make ends meet.
In 1936, his financial status greatly improved when he received the first of several commissions from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Though he worked primarily in abstraction, the five murals he completed for a WPA commission in the Melrose Public School library are realistic depictions of the West. He worked on several more New Deal commissions during the years of 1936 and 1942 in locations including Santa Fe, Clayton, and Washington D.C. During this time, Schleeter furthered his income by teaching at a Las Vegas, New Mexico art gallery during 1938 and 1939.
In 1945, the Encyclopedia Britannica referred to Schleeter as “an artist’s artist.” He also received local attention when he became one of the first artists chosen by Peter Hurd and Jane Mabry for his significant contributions to New Mexico’s art. Schleeter taught at the University of New Mexico during 1950-1951 and 1954.
Exhibited: Kansas Art Institute, 1936-1938; New Mexico State Fair, 1939 (prize); New Mexico Art League, 1939 (prize); Cedar City, New Mexico, 1941-1946; Philadelphia Artist Alliance, 1945 (solo); deYoung Memorial Museum, 1946; Art Institute of Chicago, 1947; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, 1951 (purchase prize), 1955 (purchase prize); Vienna, Austria, 1952; Guggenheim Museum, 1954; Karlsruhe Museum, Germany, 1955; Stanford University, 1955 (solo); New Mexico Highlands University, 1957 (purchase prize); Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1958; Swope Art Gallery Works Held: A&M College, New Mexico (mural); Art League of New Mexico; Cedar City Institute of Religion; Encyclopedia Britannica; Miners Hospital, Raton, New Mexico (mural); Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; Research Studio, Maitland, Florida; University of New Mexico.
Charles Green Shaw “…By a broader elimination I have sought to arrive at a greater purity.”
- Charles Green Shaw
Charles Green Shaw was born in 1892 to a wealthy New York family. He lost both his parents at a very young age (his mother died when he was just three years old). Despite the early loss of his parents, Shaw lived the whimsical life of a New York socialite. As a beneficiary to an inheritance based in part upon the Woolworth fortune, he was brought up surrounded by the well-bred, well-groomed and well-moneyed citizens of New York’s elite social class. His social status as an adolescent was cultivated while spending summers in Newport and attending Christmas balls at Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt’s. At age six, Shaw began to take an interest in drawing, and by nine, he was known to have a fondness for sketching historical costumes.
After graduating from Yale University in 1914, Shaw spent a year studying at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Subsequently he served for eighteen months as a lieutenant in World War I. After his service, Shaw returned to New York and tried his hand as a businessman selling real estate, but his attempt was short-lived.
In the early 1920s, Shaw began his career as a journalist and novelist. He achieved professional success, writing for magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Smart Set. Shaw’s writing was a record of his approvals and disapprovals of the social crowd to which he belonged. His profession, along with his social pedigree, brought him in contact with a number of the most significant figures of the 1920s such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, George Gershwin, George Jean Nathan and the American artist George Luks. Some of his profiles included celebrity caricatures used as illustrations; these were the public's first look at Shaw’s artistic ability. In 1928, a collection of Shaw’s articles and interviews were published in one volume titled "The Low Down."
Just previous to the stock market crash and the end of the Jazz Age, Shaw left New York and traveled to Paris and London. He arrived in Paris in 1929. In an autobiographical note Shaw suggests it was on this trip when he first began to paint seriously. London also acted as a great source of motivation for the budding artist. He began to sketch everyday in St. James’s Park, making large pastels of its vistas in the style of Cezanne. When he returned to New York in 1932, Shaw considered himself a painter.
Success for Shaw came quickly with his first solo exhibition mounted at the Valentine Gallery in 1934. The following year Albert Eugene Gallatin included works by the artist in an unprecedented solo exhibition at his Gallery of Living Art at New York University. Shaw further cemented his reputation as an artist through his association and friendship with fellow abstract artists Morris and Gallatin. The trio soon was regarded as the 'Park Avenue Cubists’.
As a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, Shaw became an impassioned defender of the style. His 1938 essay in the American Abstract Artists yearbook, “A Word to the Objector” acted as a defense against those who failed to see the illustrative quality of abstract art and scolded those who disregarded American artists as serious Abstractionists. He was also an influential force at the Museum of Modern Art, where he sat on the Advisory Board from 1936 to 1941.
In the later years of Shaw’s life he continued to produce abstract paintings, yet in a more private manner. He was known to be a reserved man— a ‘gentleman’; not much is known about his personal life in these later years. During this time he maintained his career as a writer, publishing the well-known children’s book "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" in 1940 and two books of poems in 1959 and 1962.
Shaw exhibited with Bertha Schaefer Gallery nearly every year during the 1960s. He also showed regularly during this period at the Passadoit Gallery, had solo exhibitions at the University of Louisville and the Century Club, and was included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1974, Shaw died in New York leaving over fifty boxes of his belongings to the Archives of American Art. This gift consisted of manuscripts for over two thousand poems, sketchbooks filling up ten boxes, his daily journal kept from 1919 to 1972 and hundreds of menus, playbills, invitations and photographs. The value of these papers lies in the extensive history and enormous amount of information they offer a social historian or anyone who desires a peak into the life of the artist.
Shaw’s work is part of most major collections of American art, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Carnegie Museum, PA; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA; the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, among others.
- Charles Green Shaw
Charles Green Shaw was born in 1892 to a wealthy New York family. He lost both his parents at a very young age (his mother died when he was just three years old). Despite the early loss of his parents, Shaw lived the whimsical life of a New York socialite. As a beneficiary to an inheritance based in part upon the Woolworth fortune, he was brought up surrounded by the well-bred, well-groomed and well-moneyed citizens of New York’s elite social class. His social status as an adolescent was cultivated while spending summers in Newport and attending Christmas balls at Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt’s. At age six, Shaw began to take an interest in drawing, and by nine, he was known to have a fondness for sketching historical costumes.
After graduating from Yale University in 1914, Shaw spent a year studying at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Subsequently he served for eighteen months as a lieutenant in World War I. After his service, Shaw returned to New York and tried his hand as a businessman selling real estate, but his attempt was short-lived.
In the early 1920s, Shaw began his career as a journalist and novelist. He achieved professional success, writing for magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Smart Set. Shaw’s writing was a record of his approvals and disapprovals of the social crowd to which he belonged. His profession, along with his social pedigree, brought him in contact with a number of the most significant figures of the 1920s such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, George Gershwin, George Jean Nathan and the American artist George Luks. Some of his profiles included celebrity caricatures used as illustrations; these were the public's first look at Shaw’s artistic ability. In 1928, a collection of Shaw’s articles and interviews were published in one volume titled "The Low Down."
Just previous to the stock market crash and the end of the Jazz Age, Shaw left New York and traveled to Paris and London. He arrived in Paris in 1929. In an autobiographical note Shaw suggests it was on this trip when he first began to paint seriously. London also acted as a great source of motivation for the budding artist. He began to sketch everyday in St. James’s Park, making large pastels of its vistas in the style of Cezanne. When he returned to New York in 1932, Shaw considered himself a painter.
Success for Shaw came quickly with his first solo exhibition mounted at the Valentine Gallery in 1934. The following year Albert Eugene Gallatin included works by the artist in an unprecedented solo exhibition at his Gallery of Living Art at New York University. Shaw further cemented his reputation as an artist through his association and friendship with fellow abstract artists Morris and Gallatin. The trio soon was regarded as the 'Park Avenue Cubists’.
As a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, Shaw became an impassioned defender of the style. His 1938 essay in the American Abstract Artists yearbook, “A Word to the Objector” acted as a defense against those who failed to see the illustrative quality of abstract art and scolded those who disregarded American artists as serious Abstractionists. He was also an influential force at the Museum of Modern Art, where he sat on the Advisory Board from 1936 to 1941.
In the later years of Shaw’s life he continued to produce abstract paintings, yet in a more private manner. He was known to be a reserved man— a ‘gentleman’; not much is known about his personal life in these later years. During this time he maintained his career as a writer, publishing the well-known children’s book "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" in 1940 and two books of poems in 1959 and 1962.
Shaw exhibited with Bertha Schaefer Gallery nearly every year during the 1960s. He also showed regularly during this period at the Passadoit Gallery, had solo exhibitions at the University of Louisville and the Century Club, and was included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1974, Shaw died in New York leaving over fifty boxes of his belongings to the Archives of American Art. This gift consisted of manuscripts for over two thousand poems, sketchbooks filling up ten boxes, his daily journal kept from 1919 to 1972 and hundreds of menus, playbills, invitations and photographs. The value of these papers lies in the extensive history and enormous amount of information they offer a social historian or anyone who desires a peak into the life of the artist.
Shaw’s work is part of most major collections of American art, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Carnegie Museum, PA; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA; the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, among others.
Millard Sheets Millard Sheets was a native California artist and grew up in the Pomona Valley near Los Angeles. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute and studied with F. Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle. While still a teenager, his watercolors were accepted for exhibition in the annual California Water Color Society shows and by nineteen years of age, he was elected into membership. At twenty, even before he graduated from Chouinard, they hired him to teach watercolor painting while completing other aspects of his art education.
Sewell Sillman A student and protégé of Josef Albers, the leading light of Black Mountain College, Sewell Sillman was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1924. He attended high school in Atlanta, where, in 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force Reserve. Simultaneously, he enrolled in evening classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and studied civil engineering there the first semester the following year.
He spent fall and winter of 1943 at the Johns Hopkins University in the Army Student Training program, before being sent abroad, where he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After his discharge, he returned to Georgia Tech in early 1946, where an instructor called him a “misfit.”
Sillman’s affiliation with Black Mountain and Albers began in January 1948. His intention was to study architecture, but he became disenchanted during the summer session, when Buckminster Fuller oversaw the unsuccessful construction of the first geodesic dome. Stimulated instead by Albers’ design and drawing courses and Pete Jennerjahn’s printing classes, Sillman shifted his focus.
He remained at the college through the following summer, and later revealed how the experience “gave me a chance to get rid of absolutely every standard that I had grown up with… It was like a snake that loses its skin… What was left was someone who had absolutely no idea in the world what to do… It was marvelous.” He soon discovered, however, after a semester at Windsor Mountain School, in Lenox, Massachusetts, that he enjoyed teaching.
In 1950, Sillman entered the bachelor of fine arts program at Yale University where Albers had become the director of the design department. Already well versed in art studio practices, Sillman obtained his degree quickly, and went on to pursue a master’s degree. He served as a teaching assistant to Albers, and in 1954 became a regular faculty member, a position he held until 1966.
In 1952, he returned to Black Mountain for the summer, but, without Albers, found the place changed and dominated by abstract expressionism in the guise of fellow teachers Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov. “When Albers left it was just so empty… It was death warmed over.”
In his own work Sillman continued to examine basic design and drawing concerns, such as the relationships of colors and shapes, and the use of line, which evolved from his teaching regimen. His oil paintings are formal exercises with hues that are far from primary applied with a palette knife to create bold geometric compositions. In contrast his series of “wave drawings,” artfully filled with curving lines, are organic and reminiscent of forms in nature.
In 1956, Sillman organized an exhibition of Albers’ work for Yale’s new art gallery and in the catalogue used two original screenprints from his mentor’s Homage to the Square series. From this experience grew a collaboration, not only with Albers, but with fellow faculty member and graphic designer, Norman Ives; jointly they issued Interaction of Color—1800 portfolios of eighty screenprints by Albers which became a seminal thesis on color theory. Established in 1962, the firm of Ives-Sillman produced portfolios and prints for other artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Roy Lichtenstein, and Walker Evans.
Between 1963 and 1965 Sillman taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and after his departure from Yale in 1966, he held positions at the Rhode Island School of Design, the State University of New York at Purchase, and Ohio State University, and he returned to Yale between 1973 and 1978 to teach advanced seminars.
He spent fall and winter of 1943 at the Johns Hopkins University in the Army Student Training program, before being sent abroad, where he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After his discharge, he returned to Georgia Tech in early 1946, where an instructor called him a “misfit.”
Sillman’s affiliation with Black Mountain and Albers began in January 1948. His intention was to study architecture, but he became disenchanted during the summer session, when Buckminster Fuller oversaw the unsuccessful construction of the first geodesic dome. Stimulated instead by Albers’ design and drawing courses and Pete Jennerjahn’s printing classes, Sillman shifted his focus.
He remained at the college through the following summer, and later revealed how the experience “gave me a chance to get rid of absolutely every standard that I had grown up with… It was like a snake that loses its skin… What was left was someone who had absolutely no idea in the world what to do… It was marvelous.” He soon discovered, however, after a semester at Windsor Mountain School, in Lenox, Massachusetts, that he enjoyed teaching.
In 1950, Sillman entered the bachelor of fine arts program at Yale University where Albers had become the director of the design department. Already well versed in art studio practices, Sillman obtained his degree quickly, and went on to pursue a master’s degree. He served as a teaching assistant to Albers, and in 1954 became a regular faculty member, a position he held until 1966.
In 1952, he returned to Black Mountain for the summer, but, without Albers, found the place changed and dominated by abstract expressionism in the guise of fellow teachers Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov. “When Albers left it was just so empty… It was death warmed over.”
In his own work Sillman continued to examine basic design and drawing concerns, such as the relationships of colors and shapes, and the use of line, which evolved from his teaching regimen. His oil paintings are formal exercises with hues that are far from primary applied with a palette knife to create bold geometric compositions. In contrast his series of “wave drawings,” artfully filled with curving lines, are organic and reminiscent of forms in nature.
In 1956, Sillman organized an exhibition of Albers’ work for Yale’s new art gallery and in the catalogue used two original screenprints from his mentor’s Homage to the Square series. From this experience grew a collaboration, not only with Albers, but with fellow faculty member and graphic designer, Norman Ives; jointly they issued Interaction of Color—1800 portfolios of eighty screenprints by Albers which became a seminal thesis on color theory. Established in 1962, the firm of Ives-Sillman produced portfolios and prints for other artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Roy Lichtenstein, and Walker Evans.
Between 1963 and 1965 Sillman taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and after his departure from Yale in 1966, he held positions at the Rhode Island School of Design, the State University of New York at Purchase, and Ohio State University, and he returned to Yale between 1973 and 1978 to teach advanced seminars.
David Simpson Pasadena, California-born abstract painter David Simpson uses meticulous arrangements of color and form to elevate his meditatively abstract compositions. Simpson has said "I want my paintings to create space: to find room. I want them to create space without taking it, and to be contemplative in the process. Hence their apparent simplicity and openness."
His stripe paintings were included in critic Clement Greenberg's Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, "Post Painterly Abstraction," along with work by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. Critic Kenneth Baker, speaking of a recent exhibition of David Simpson works in San Francisco, noted 1that “Simpson's uncompromising abstractions may look almost as radical today as when he made them [in the 1970s.] He invites us to enjoy the materials of illusionism and its invitation of fantasy, without forgetting ourselves.”
For years, David Simpson was on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He was amongst fifteen artists exhibited at the MOMA in 1963 in one of Dorothy Miller's last exhibitions entitled "Americans".
His works are found in numerous public and private collections around the world, including Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; La Jolla Museum of Art, La Jolla, CA; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Il; Museum of Contemporary Art (MART), Roverato, Italy; Museo di Arte Cantonale, Lugano, Switzerland; Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY; and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., among others.
His stripe paintings were included in critic Clement Greenberg's Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, "Post Painterly Abstraction," along with work by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. Critic Kenneth Baker, speaking of a recent exhibition of David Simpson works in San Francisco, noted 1that “Simpson's uncompromising abstractions may look almost as radical today as when he made them [in the 1970s.] He invites us to enjoy the materials of illusionism and its invitation of fantasy, without forgetting ourselves.”
For years, David Simpson was on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He was amongst fifteen artists exhibited at the MOMA in 1963 in one of Dorothy Miller's last exhibitions entitled "Americans".
His works are found in numerous public and private collections around the world, including Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; La Jolla Museum of Art, La Jolla, CA; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Il; Museum of Contemporary Art (MART), Roverato, Italy; Museo di Arte Cantonale, Lugano, Switzerland; Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, Italy; Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY; and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., among others.
Agnes Sims Agnes Sims (1910 - 1990) is known for paintings and sculptures inspired by prehistoric rock art of New Mexico.
Born in Devon, Pennsylvania, Sims attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She managed a traveling marionette theater before establishing herself as a textile and needlework designer in Philadelphia.
After a visit to New Mexico in 1938, Sims returned to Philadelphia, packed her belongings, and returned to make Santa Fe her permanent home. She opened a classical record store in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on Canyon Road, but the shortage of shellac during the War put her out of business. Sims then became a building contractor (skills taught her by her contractor father), purchasing and renovating historic houses around Santa Fe. She later bought a nineteenth-century house with acreage on Canyon Road and built a compound including a house for herself and one for her long-time partner, Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar who had brought writers such as Eurdora Welty and Truman Capote to the public’s attention.
Shortly after her arrival, a friend introduced Sims to the Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe which was dotted with the ruins of prehistoric Indian Pueblos, and home to tens of thousands of ancient petroglyphs. The rock art captivated Sims and became her primary inspiration for the rest of her career. Over the next decade she recorded 3000 petroglyphs in drawings and thousands more in photographs. In 1949 she received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to further her research, and in 1950 she published a portfolio of selected rock at drawings in her monograph, San Cristobal Petroglyphs.
Most of Sims' paintings and sculptures were inspired by petroglyphs, but unlike her documentary drawings they never were literal copies. Rather she adopted and adapted the two-dimensional representations of people and animal into an art that fit comfortably into the larger world of mid-century modernism. She used simple, idiosyncratic figures to create her own symbolism, the original meanings of the ancient art being mostly lost to the past.
Sims worked in a wide array of media. Her oil paintings on canvas often were mixed with an earthen medium which gave them a rough, stone-like texture. She developed a batik-like resist process for painting on cloth, and used it to produce large, unstretched wall hangings. She used this technique to produce an architectural frieze 3.5 feet high and almost 150 feet long, which still adorns the Century Bank lobby in downtown Santa Fe. Sims was a prolific sculptor, working in wood, stone, bronze, terracotta, fiberglass, and polyester.
Sims was given one-woman shows at the Brooklyn Museum, U.S. Embassy in London, Folger Library, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe. She also showed her work at the gallery she owned on Canyon Road. At times, she rented studio space in her gallery building to local artisans, hoping to spark a revival of early New Mexico arts and crafts.
Although she did not offer formal instruction, Sims was known for her generous encouragement of younger artists. In the large patio of the Canyon Road compound, she hosted public performances of original dance, music, and theater and readings by local authors. She also was known for her love of good food and scotch and living strictly on her own terms. She was honored with the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievements in the Arts a few months before her death from Alzheimer’s disease in 1990.
Born in Devon, Pennsylvania, Sims attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She managed a traveling marionette theater before establishing herself as a textile and needlework designer in Philadelphia.
After a visit to New Mexico in 1938, Sims returned to Philadelphia, packed her belongings, and returned to make Santa Fe her permanent home. She opened a classical record store in an eighteenth-century farmhouse on Canyon Road, but the shortage of shellac during the War put her out of business. Sims then became a building contractor (skills taught her by her contractor father), purchasing and renovating historic houses around Santa Fe. She later bought a nineteenth-century house with acreage on Canyon Road and built a compound including a house for herself and one for her long-time partner, Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar who had brought writers such as Eurdora Welty and Truman Capote to the public’s attention.
Shortly after her arrival, a friend introduced Sims to the Galisteo Basin south of Santa Fe which was dotted with the ruins of prehistoric Indian Pueblos, and home to tens of thousands of ancient petroglyphs. The rock art captivated Sims and became her primary inspiration for the rest of her career. Over the next decade she recorded 3000 petroglyphs in drawings and thousands more in photographs. In 1949 she received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to further her research, and in 1950 she published a portfolio of selected rock at drawings in her monograph, San Cristobal Petroglyphs.
Most of Sims' paintings and sculptures were inspired by petroglyphs, but unlike her documentary drawings they never were literal copies. Rather she adopted and adapted the two-dimensional representations of people and animal into an art that fit comfortably into the larger world of mid-century modernism. She used simple, idiosyncratic figures to create her own symbolism, the original meanings of the ancient art being mostly lost to the past.
Sims worked in a wide array of media. Her oil paintings on canvas often were mixed with an earthen medium which gave them a rough, stone-like texture. She developed a batik-like resist process for painting on cloth, and used it to produce large, unstretched wall hangings. She used this technique to produce an architectural frieze 3.5 feet high and almost 150 feet long, which still adorns the Century Bank lobby in downtown Santa Fe. Sims was a prolific sculptor, working in wood, stone, bronze, terracotta, fiberglass, and polyester.
Sims was given one-woman shows at the Brooklyn Museum, U.S. Embassy in London, Folger Library, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe. She also showed her work at the gallery she owned on Canyon Road. At times, she rented studio space in her gallery building to local artisans, hoping to spark a revival of early New Mexico arts and crafts.
Although she did not offer formal instruction, Sims was known for her generous encouragement of younger artists. In the large patio of the Canyon Road compound, she hosted public performances of original dance, music, and theater and readings by local authors. She also was known for her love of good food and scotch and living strictly on her own terms. She was honored with the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievements in the Arts a few months before her death from Alzheimer’s disease in 1990.
Robert Slutzky “…the longer you look, the more you find; the more you find, the longer you look. It's a nice reverse equation.
Painting is perceptual music. It has to do with the retina. In music you need an ear for sound. In painting you need an eye for color within geometry.”
- Robert Slutzky
A painter, educator, and architectural theorist dedicated to exploring the connections between painting and architecture, Robert Slutzky focused on how space was created in architecture and implied in painting. He believed that to understand either discipline, you had to understand both.
Anthony Vidler, dean at Cooper Union, said: "Slutzky was a natural person to teach art and concepts of color and concepts of space to architects, because he could read them in painting."
Robert Slutzky was born on November 27, 1929, in Brooklyn and earned a certificate of art in 1951 from Cooper Union, subsequently studying with Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1954. His first job after art school was Teaching architecture at the University of Texas, where he co-authored two seminal essays entitled “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”, with Colin Rowe. Initially published in 1964 and subsequently translated into several foreign languages, the essays challenged the bland and formulaic glass boxes of the International Style, calling for a richer and more complex visual language of modern architecture.
He later taught at Cornell University and the Pratt Institute. From 1968 to 1990, he taught at his alma mater, Cooper Union, then taught in the department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2005, where he served as the chair. He received the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001.
Keenly interested in questions of visual perception and poetics, Slutzky was intimately concerned with color and form, and with the contrapuntal, almost musical, relation between the two. He also focused on the relationship between proportion and placement.
“I regard painting as being as hermetic as music,” he said in an interview with Emmanuel J. Petit.
“Just as music is governed by its own compositional rules and not beholden to representation, so painting should be able to enjoy an absolute dissociation from the representational world. The latter is expressed through the illusion of foreground, middle ground, and background, the world of perspectival space. By excluding representation, an illusion of another kind becomes possible, which is the illusion of color and shape. This is a unique freedom that painting can enjoy; it is painting's "musicality." Just as much as sound needs time to evolve into a musical structure, so painting needs time as well, ‘aesthetic time.’ Aesthetic time is the time that is needed to activate different spatial constructs, and that is extendable by the viewer. I want the viewer to unravel the complexity of a painterly structure, and at the same time I want to give a thematically pronounced meaning to that structure.“
His abstract compositions of vividly colored squares, grids and lines arranged in perfect geometric balance were a kind of two-dimensional architecture, reflecting the influence of both Mondrian and the Bauhaus painter Josef Albers.
Reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Slutzky's work in The New York Times in 1975, Hilton Kramer wrote: "Mr. Slutzky works within the strict pictorial conventions of geometrical abstraction, which, in his hands, is a medium of lyric improvisation. Everything here depends on proportion and placement, on the weight and intensity of color, and thus on delicacy of feeling."
In Slutzky's later work, hard edges at times gave way to looser brushwork, but the dialogue between color and structure remained paramount.
His works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Painting is perceptual music. It has to do with the retina. In music you need an ear for sound. In painting you need an eye for color within geometry.”
- Robert Slutzky
A painter, educator, and architectural theorist dedicated to exploring the connections between painting and architecture, Robert Slutzky focused on how space was created in architecture and implied in painting. He believed that to understand either discipline, you had to understand both.
Anthony Vidler, dean at Cooper Union, said: "Slutzky was a natural person to teach art and concepts of color and concepts of space to architects, because he could read them in painting."
Robert Slutzky was born on November 27, 1929, in Brooklyn and earned a certificate of art in 1951 from Cooper Union, subsequently studying with Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1954. His first job after art school was Teaching architecture at the University of Texas, where he co-authored two seminal essays entitled “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”, with Colin Rowe. Initially published in 1964 and subsequently translated into several foreign languages, the essays challenged the bland and formulaic glass boxes of the International Style, calling for a richer and more complex visual language of modern architecture.
He later taught at Cornell University and the Pratt Institute. From 1968 to 1990, he taught at his alma mater, Cooper Union, then taught in the department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania from 1990 to 2005, where he served as the chair. He received the G. Holmes Perkins Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2001.
Keenly interested in questions of visual perception and poetics, Slutzky was intimately concerned with color and form, and with the contrapuntal, almost musical, relation between the two. He also focused on the relationship between proportion and placement.
“I regard painting as being as hermetic as music,” he said in an interview with Emmanuel J. Petit.
“Just as music is governed by its own compositional rules and not beholden to representation, so painting should be able to enjoy an absolute dissociation from the representational world. The latter is expressed through the illusion of foreground, middle ground, and background, the world of perspectival space. By excluding representation, an illusion of another kind becomes possible, which is the illusion of color and shape. This is a unique freedom that painting can enjoy; it is painting's "musicality." Just as much as sound needs time to evolve into a musical structure, so painting needs time as well, ‘aesthetic time.’ Aesthetic time is the time that is needed to activate different spatial constructs, and that is extendable by the viewer. I want the viewer to unravel the complexity of a painterly structure, and at the same time I want to give a thematically pronounced meaning to that structure.“
His abstract compositions of vividly colored squares, grids and lines arranged in perfect geometric balance were a kind of two-dimensional architecture, reflecting the influence of both Mondrian and the Bauhaus painter Josef Albers.
Reviewing an exhibition of Mr. Slutzky's work in The New York Times in 1975, Hilton Kramer wrote: "Mr. Slutzky works within the strict pictorial conventions of geometrical abstraction, which, in his hands, is a medium of lyric improvisation. Everything here depends on proportion and placement, on the weight and intensity of color, and thus on delicacy of feeling."
In Slutzky's later work, hard edges at times gave way to looser brushwork, but the dialogue between color and structure remained paramount.
His works have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others.
Leon Polk Smith Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter who combined the rhythmic patterns of his Cherokee ancestry with the Hard-Edged and Minimalist styles of abstraction that he helped popularize in New York during the latter half of the 20th century.
Smith was born near Chickasha, a year before Oklahoma became a state. His parents, William and Samantha Smith, had arrived in present-day Oklahoma from Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, and had settled on land with the Chickasaw Nation and Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. Smith was the eighth of nine children and labored on his parents' modest homestead throughout an impoverished childhood.
When he was still quite young, one of Smith’s brothers had married a woman of Chickasaw origin, who taught him her songs and language. His parents themselves had Cherokee ancestry. Although at the time Oklahoma had only a small African American population compared to its American Indian population, Smith’s parents were committed to the principle of equal opportunity and instilled this in their offspring. They had observed the marginalization of the American Indian population by the white settlers, and they encouraged their children to recognize their own Indian ancestry by socializing openly with all of their neighbors, regardless of origin. As a consequence, Smith would prove to be a staunch, early supporter of the civil rights movement during his first two full-time appointments outside Oklahoma.
After high school, he worked as a ranch-hand in Oklahoma, then built roads and constructed telephone systems in Arizona. During this period Smith sent money home to help his parents with the mortgage on their land, but even the aggregate of the family's funds proved insufficient to avoid foreclosure.
After the foreclosure and released from the burden of familial financial support, Smith enrolled at Oklahoma State College (now East Central University), in Ada, Oklahoma, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Following graduation, he moved to New York City (1936), where he attended the Columbia University Teacher's College. Smith's artistic development was set in motion during his first semester at Columbia, when one of his teachers took him to see the Gallatin Collection, then at New York University. The sight of paintings by Mondrian and sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp was a formative and deeply influential experience.
A year after earning his M.A. degree at Columbia and returning home to Oklahoma, Smith had earned enough to plan his first trip to Europe, in the summer of 1939. He visited the major countries of Western Europe with the exception of Germany and the states on its eastern borders, which were already closed to tourism because of the brewing political circumstances.
Once back in Oklahoma, Smith decided that it was time for him to seek a post elsewhere on a more advanced level and became an assistant professor of art at Georgia Teachers College in Collegeboro.
Smith prospered in Georgia and made influential friends on the faculty. While holding a full-time job, he pursued his art and was inspired by a trip to Mexico. Prophetically, his first one-artist show took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January and February 1941. The fifteen paintings and eighteen watercolors were figurative, and reviewers generally found them praiseworthy. In the following year two more exhibitions followed in rapid succession, and Smith’s reputation was growing. The first of these 1942 shows consisted largely of works inspired by Mexico, and it was also Smith’s first one-artist exhibition in a museum, taking place at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. The second 1942 exhibition was his debut in abstraction and took place at the Pinocoteca Gallery in New York. Also in the same year, Smith left Georgia when he felt that the state government’s resistance to campus desegregation was too far from his deeply held convictions. He accepted a post as State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, where much segregation remained in place but was less obvious.
In the decade that followed, Smith moved through preliminary explorations of neo-plasticism and began to paint in a more hard-edge style, typified by geometric lines, curving shapes of color, and the use of tondo (disk-shaped) canvases. A review for a 1956 solo show at the Camino Gallery noted Smith as a Geometric painter, who had "extended De Stijl principles to include tonal variations and nonrectilinear elements."
Smith acknowledged his debt to the De Stijl movement and to Mondrian, but stated that he was looking in his work to take the road beyond: "people said [Mondrian] had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so." He was inspired by Mondrian’s works, if not fully convinced by the philosophy behind them. Pragmatic in his approach, Smith took what he wanted from the aesthetic experience and left the theorizing behind.
Critic Arthur Danto, in his analysis of Smith’s absorption of Mondrian’s style, suggests that the way in which Smith comprehended space is attributable directly to his Southwestern background. Smith’s perceptions of artistic space led to a quest to make color and form one. This quest consisted of a series of intuitive decisions rather than the theoretical, ruminative creative process that preoccupied Mondrian and other members of the De Stijl group.
Although he was pleased with his working situation and with the results of his efforts in Delaware, after two years Smith felt it was time to move on. “With me, New York City was love at first sight,” he wrote, and in 1944, he determined to return.
Smith shared Mondrian's affection for New York, writing in 1989: "New York City revealed its physical self to me through the mountains and canyons of the Southwest. There were the ups and downs--the high peaks, the in-betweens, or the canyons, and topped with the great dome....I felt the city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction." (Ratcliff, 1996).
Lacking funds to remain financially independent, Smith sought a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In the process of application, he was offered a job assisting at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to become the Guggenheim Museum) by Hilla Rebay, who was director of both the foundation and the museum. She had informed him that he was too late for the current funding cycle but that he could apply the following spring.
It was an important learning opportunity, coming at the right moment for him, to work among examples of art by the leading European geometric abstractionists. As part of the Guggenheim Fellowship that Smith eventually received, he traveled back to the Southwest to proselytize as an art educator for the new abstraction, distributing Guggenheim materials in Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he still had many contacts. Santa Fe had a long-established, growing artists’ community, and he even attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize a show there of some of the Guggenheim’s collection.
With the support of prominent gallerists in the late 1950s, by the mid-60s Smith had found an audience for his work as an independent voice. His artwork was included in two important group exhibitions, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966). His two important series of the period, Correspondences and Constellations impressed reviewers with their interplay of form, color, and space.
During the next few years Smith established affiliations with various galleries and maintained studio and living spaces in buildings housing other artists, while leaving on occasion for visiting teaching posts. An appointment lasting two years at Rollins College in Florida was followed by a brief residence in Cuba.
In 1966, Smith established a summer home on Long Island at Shoreham, which for a time also served as his principal residence. For most of the remaining years of his life, Smith remained in New York City.
Smith died in Manhattan in 1996, with an acknowledged position in the development of American geometric abstraction. He had arrived at geometry before others and remained steadfastly loyal to its principles, cultivating aspects of scale and simplicity that presaged the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles of the late 1950s and '60s. Younger painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Al Held visited his studio and came away inspired. But he cultivated a maverick attitude as a New York outsider that resisted definition as part of any single contemporary movement on the arts scene. This challenged his reviewers, as they looked for easy ways to describe his status and his work. When asked for his inspirations at a post-commencement speech roundtable, Smith cited the two professors of English who opened his mind to the beauty of Middle-English and poetry, rather than name-dropping his contemporaries or artistic mentors.
The Leon Polk Smith Foundation was established by the artist before his death to "preserve and promote the art and legacy of Leon Polk Smith."
Smith's work is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, New York; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago, Illinois; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. ; the Institut für Diskrete Mathematiks, Bonn, Germany; the Israel Museum; Jerusalem, Israel; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst,Ingolstadt, Germany; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the mumok, Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the National Gallery of Art ,Washington, D.C.; the Neue Nationalgalerie,Berlin, Germany; the Neues Museum Nuremberg (State Museum for Art and Design), Nuremberg, Germany; the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Pogue Art Gallery, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among others.
biographical sources inlcude Artsy; Artnet; Robert Buck, “Leon Polk Smith American Original,” Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma; and others
Smith was born near Chickasha, a year before Oklahoma became a state. His parents, William and Samantha Smith, had arrived in present-day Oklahoma from Tennessee at the end of the 19th century, and had settled on land with the Chickasaw Nation and Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. Smith was the eighth of nine children and labored on his parents' modest homestead throughout an impoverished childhood.
When he was still quite young, one of Smith’s brothers had married a woman of Chickasaw origin, who taught him her songs and language. His parents themselves had Cherokee ancestry. Although at the time Oklahoma had only a small African American population compared to its American Indian population, Smith’s parents were committed to the principle of equal opportunity and instilled this in their offspring. They had observed the marginalization of the American Indian population by the white settlers, and they encouraged their children to recognize their own Indian ancestry by socializing openly with all of their neighbors, regardless of origin. As a consequence, Smith would prove to be a staunch, early supporter of the civil rights movement during his first two full-time appointments outside Oklahoma.
After high school, he worked as a ranch-hand in Oklahoma, then built roads and constructed telephone systems in Arizona. During this period Smith sent money home to help his parents with the mortgage on their land, but even the aggregate of the family's funds proved insufficient to avoid foreclosure.
After the foreclosure and released from the burden of familial financial support, Smith enrolled at Oklahoma State College (now East Central University), in Ada, Oklahoma, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Following graduation, he moved to New York City (1936), where he attended the Columbia University Teacher's College. Smith's artistic development was set in motion during his first semester at Columbia, when one of his teachers took him to see the Gallatin Collection, then at New York University. The sight of paintings by Mondrian and sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp was a formative and deeply influential experience.
A year after earning his M.A. degree at Columbia and returning home to Oklahoma, Smith had earned enough to plan his first trip to Europe, in the summer of 1939. He visited the major countries of Western Europe with the exception of Germany and the states on its eastern borders, which were already closed to tourism because of the brewing political circumstances.
Once back in Oklahoma, Smith decided that it was time for him to seek a post elsewhere on a more advanced level and became an assistant professor of art at Georgia Teachers College in Collegeboro.
Smith prospered in Georgia and made influential friends on the faculty. While holding a full-time job, he pursued his art and was inspired by a trip to Mexico. Prophetically, his first one-artist show took place in New York at the Uptown Galleries in January and February 1941. The fifteen paintings and eighteen watercolors were figurative, and reviewers generally found them praiseworthy. In the following year two more exhibitions followed in rapid succession, and Smith’s reputation was growing. The first of these 1942 shows consisted largely of works inspired by Mexico, and it was also Smith’s first one-artist exhibition in a museum, taking place at the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences in Savannah. The second 1942 exhibition was his debut in abstraction and took place at the Pinocoteca Gallery in New York. Also in the same year, Smith left Georgia when he felt that the state government’s resistance to campus desegregation was too far from his deeply held convictions. He accepted a post as State Supervisor of Art Education in Delaware, where much segregation remained in place but was less obvious.
In the decade that followed, Smith moved through preliminary explorations of neo-plasticism and began to paint in a more hard-edge style, typified by geometric lines, curving shapes of color, and the use of tondo (disk-shaped) canvases. A review for a 1956 solo show at the Camino Gallery noted Smith as a Geometric painter, who had "extended De Stijl principles to include tonal variations and nonrectilinear elements."
Smith acknowledged his debt to the De Stijl movement and to Mondrian, but stated that he was looking in his work to take the road beyond: "people said [Mondrian] had hit a dead end, or a stone wall and I said I don't think so." He was inspired by Mondrian’s works, if not fully convinced by the philosophy behind them. Pragmatic in his approach, Smith took what he wanted from the aesthetic experience and left the theorizing behind.
Critic Arthur Danto, in his analysis of Smith’s absorption of Mondrian’s style, suggests that the way in which Smith comprehended space is attributable directly to his Southwestern background. Smith’s perceptions of artistic space led to a quest to make color and form one. This quest consisted of a series of intuitive decisions rather than the theoretical, ruminative creative process that preoccupied Mondrian and other members of the De Stijl group.
Although he was pleased with his working situation and with the results of his efforts in Delaware, after two years Smith felt it was time to move on. “With me, New York City was love at first sight,” he wrote, and in 1944, he determined to return.
Smith shared Mondrian's affection for New York, writing in 1989: "New York City revealed its physical self to me through the mountains and canyons of the Southwest. There were the ups and downs--the high peaks, the in-betweens, or the canyons, and topped with the great dome....I felt the city to be a perfect equation for a great abstraction." (Ratcliff, 1996).
Lacking funds to remain financially independent, Smith sought a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In the process of application, he was offered a job assisting at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later to become the Guggenheim Museum) by Hilla Rebay, who was director of both the foundation and the museum. She had informed him that he was too late for the current funding cycle but that he could apply the following spring.
It was an important learning opportunity, coming at the right moment for him, to work among examples of art by the leading European geometric abstractionists. As part of the Guggenheim Fellowship that Smith eventually received, he traveled back to the Southwest to proselytize as an art educator for the new abstraction, distributing Guggenheim materials in Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he still had many contacts. Santa Fe had a long-established, growing artists’ community, and he even attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize a show there of some of the Guggenheim’s collection.
With the support of prominent gallerists in the late 1950s, by the mid-60s Smith had found an audience for his work as an independent voice. His artwork was included in two important group exhibitions, The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965) and Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1966). His two important series of the period, Correspondences and Constellations impressed reviewers with their interplay of form, color, and space.
During the next few years Smith established affiliations with various galleries and maintained studio and living spaces in buildings housing other artists, while leaving on occasion for visiting teaching posts. An appointment lasting two years at Rollins College in Florida was followed by a brief residence in Cuba.
In 1966, Smith established a summer home on Long Island at Shoreham, which for a time also served as his principal residence. For most of the remaining years of his life, Smith remained in New York City.
Smith died in Manhattan in 1996, with an acknowledged position in the development of American geometric abstraction. He had arrived at geometry before others and remained steadfastly loyal to its principles, cultivating aspects of scale and simplicity that presaged the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles of the late 1950s and '60s. Younger painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Al Held visited his studio and came away inspired. But he cultivated a maverick attitude as a New York outsider that resisted definition as part of any single contemporary movement on the arts scene. This challenged his reviewers, as they looked for easy ways to describe his status and his work. When asked for his inspirations at a post-commencement speech roundtable, Smith cited the two professors of English who opened his mind to the beauty of Middle-English and poetry, rather than name-dropping his contemporaries or artistic mentors.
The Leon Polk Smith Foundation was established by the artist before his death to "preserve and promote the art and legacy of Leon Polk Smith."
Smith's work is included in the collections of numerous museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum , Brooklyn, New York; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires, Argentina; the Art Institute of Chicago,Chicago, Illinois; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; the Musée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. ; the Institut für Diskrete Mathematiks, Bonn, Germany; the Israel Museum; Jerusalem, Israel; the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma; the Museum für Konkrete Kunst,Ingolstadt, Germany; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the mumok, Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the National Gallery of Art ,Washington, D.C.; the Neue Nationalgalerie,Berlin, Germany; the Neues Museum Nuremberg (State Museum for Art and Design), Nuremberg, Germany; the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, Stillwater, Oklahoma; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Pogue Art Gallery, East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among others.
biographical sources inlcude Artsy; Artnet; Robert Buck, “Leon Polk Smith American Original,” Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma; and others
Georges Spiro Georges Spiro was a Polish-French painter, who worked primarily in gouache. His surrealist works were shown in Germany, France, England, and New York. In 1952 Dior de la Souchère, curator of the Musée Grimaldi in Antibes, bought some of works Spiro's paintings at the Revue Surrealiste. Six years later, at the Biennale de Menton, Spiro was awarded the third prize.
Theodoros Stamos A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Theodoros Stamos is known for paintings done later in his career, which are large expanses of dissolved light. Underestimated at first by Clement Greenberg, the New York critic whose commentary often decided the reputation of Abstract Expressionists, Greenberg later wrote: I scorched his show and I was wrong. You keep on learning." (Falk 3138)
Of his painting, Stamos said: "The great figurative painters were involved with grandeur of vision, using the figure as a means to an end, whereas today the best of the abstrtact painters are also involved with a grandeur of vision using color as their means toward a new space-light." (Herskovic 318)
Stamos was also an art educator and held positions at the Art Students League, Columbia University, Black Mountain College and Brandeis University.
Stamos was born in Manhattan to Greek immigrant parents and studied sculpture for three years, 1936 to 1939, at the American Artist's School. In 1939, he turned to painting, and in this medium was basically self taught.
With their amorphous shapes and busy lines, his first paintings resembled those of Mark Rothko, who became his close companion, and of William Baziotes. Stamos' colors were in tonal clusters, vague and undifferentiated.
During the 1940s, Theodore Stamos ran a framing shop near Union Square where his customers included modernists Arshile Gorky and Fernand Leger. In 1943, he had his first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery. Several years later, he began painting with distinct bands of color, usually black or very dark, and then in the 1950s, his work was much less controlled, more violent, emotive, and confrontational.
In 1950, Theodore Stamos was the youngest artist to be included in the famous "irascibles" photograph of leading Abstract Expressionists. He began a "Sun Box" series in 1963 with shapes that took on enormous size, filling almost the entire surface of the canvas, with the suggestion of atmospheric light and organic expansion.
A close friend of Mark Rothko's, he was executor of his estate and later found guilty of negligence in a 1975 trial. He and the Marlborough Gallery were fined $9.2 million dollars.
In later years he lived between New York and the Greek Island of Lefkada.
Bio Via AskArt
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art"
Marika Herskovic, "American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey"
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
Of his painting, Stamos said: "The great figurative painters were involved with grandeur of vision, using the figure as a means to an end, whereas today the best of the abstrtact painters are also involved with a grandeur of vision using color as their means toward a new space-light." (Herskovic 318)
Stamos was also an art educator and held positions at the Art Students League, Columbia University, Black Mountain College and Brandeis University.
Stamos was born in Manhattan to Greek immigrant parents and studied sculpture for three years, 1936 to 1939, at the American Artist's School. In 1939, he turned to painting, and in this medium was basically self taught.
With their amorphous shapes and busy lines, his first paintings resembled those of Mark Rothko, who became his close companion, and of William Baziotes. Stamos' colors were in tonal clusters, vague and undifferentiated.
During the 1940s, Theodore Stamos ran a framing shop near Union Square where his customers included modernists Arshile Gorky and Fernand Leger. In 1943, he had his first solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery. Several years later, he began painting with distinct bands of color, usually black or very dark, and then in the 1950s, his work was much less controlled, more violent, emotive, and confrontational.
In 1950, Theodore Stamos was the youngest artist to be included in the famous "irascibles" photograph of leading Abstract Expressionists. He began a "Sun Box" series in 1963 with shapes that took on enormous size, filling almost the entire surface of the canvas, with the suggestion of atmospheric light and organic expansion.
A close friend of Mark Rothko's, he was executor of his estate and later found guilty of negligence in a 1975 trial. He and the Marlborough Gallery were fined $9.2 million dollars.
In later years he lived between New York and the Greek Island of Lefkada.
Bio Via AskArt
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art"
Marika Herskovic, "American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey"
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
Joseph Stella Born in Muro Lucano, near Naples, Italy, Joseph Stella is best known for his painting Brooklyn Bridge, 1919 a futurist work that is an icon of the Industrial Age.
Joseph Stella was a Futurist painter known for his association with the American Precisionism movement and his works depicting industrial America. Stella was born in Lucano, Italy. In 1896, he relocated to New York, NY, to study medicine. After becoming interested in art, Stella left his medical studies and began to study art at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he studied under William Merritt Chase. During this time, Stella's early works featured a Rembrandt style and depicted scenes from city slum life.
Between the years of 1905 and 1909, Stella was employed as an illustrator. He was commissioned to paint a series based on industrial Pittsburgh in 1908. While visiting Italy in 1909, Stella was exposed to Modernism for the first time. This exposure would later heavily influence his unique personal style. He also became associated with several Italian Futurist artists during this time. In 1913, Stella returned to New York and painted several works, including Mardi Gras, Battle of Lights, and Coney Island. He also participated in the New York Armory Show of 1913.
During the 1920s, Stella became interested in the geometric lines reflected in the architecture of Lower Manhattan. In the works he produced during this time, Stella combined the elements of Futurism and Cubism. His most famous work, featuring the Brooklyn Bridge, was produced during this time. Another well-known work produced in this period is New York Interpreted. Comprised of five panels, this work depicts various skyscrapers and bridges. The work reflects a popular concept of the time that industry would eventually take the place of religion in modern life. In the 1930s, Stella traveled throughout the world and was inspired by such locations as North Africa and the West Indies. During this time, Stella utilized a variety of styles, including Realism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. These works included religious themes, city themes, nature and botanical studies, and Caribbean landscapes. The artist died on November 5, 1946.
Joseph Stella was a Futurist painter known for his association with the American Precisionism movement and his works depicting industrial America. Stella was born in Lucano, Italy. In 1896, he relocated to New York, NY, to study medicine. After becoming interested in art, Stella left his medical studies and began to study art at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he studied under William Merritt Chase. During this time, Stella's early works featured a Rembrandt style and depicted scenes from city slum life.
Between the years of 1905 and 1909, Stella was employed as an illustrator. He was commissioned to paint a series based on industrial Pittsburgh in 1908. While visiting Italy in 1909, Stella was exposed to Modernism for the first time. This exposure would later heavily influence his unique personal style. He also became associated with several Italian Futurist artists during this time. In 1913, Stella returned to New York and painted several works, including Mardi Gras, Battle of Lights, and Coney Island. He also participated in the New York Armory Show of 1913.
During the 1920s, Stella became interested in the geometric lines reflected in the architecture of Lower Manhattan. In the works he produced during this time, Stella combined the elements of Futurism and Cubism. His most famous work, featuring the Brooklyn Bridge, was produced during this time. Another well-known work produced in this period is New York Interpreted. Comprised of five panels, this work depicts various skyscrapers and bridges. The work reflects a popular concept of the time that industry would eventually take the place of religion in modern life. In the 1930s, Stella traveled throughout the world and was inspired by such locations as North Africa and the West Indies. During this time, Stella utilized a variety of styles, including Realism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. These works included religious themes, city themes, nature and botanical studies, and Caribbean landscapes. The artist died on November 5, 1946.
John Stephan John Stephan (1906-1995) devoted himself exclusively to disc paintings for the last three decades of his artistic career. These nearly square compositions, always just inches taller than they are wide, each comprise a central monochrome circle delineated from its ground by multiple bands of contrasting colors. Depending how the particular colors come alive in relation to one another, the central orb floats or recedes, emanating pulsing energy or enveloping the gaze. Painting after painting, Stephan found within the fixed parameters of this geometric distribution an infinite potential for visual poetry in the juxtaposition of his subtly mixed colors.
The monumental achievement of Stephan's disc paintings stands on the solid foundation of a lifetime of artistic accomplishment. Having painted urban landscapes and worked as a WPA artist through the 1930s, John Stephan truly came of age as an artist after World War II. An important figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism, Stephan showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery and counted among his close associates Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.
With poet (and then wife) Ruth Stephan, he published The Tiger's Eye, an influential "little magazine" that chronicled the creative ferment of the period. Inspired by William Blake's "Tyger," the title symbolized the editors' faith in the power of creative vision, as did John Stephan's design for the cover which prominently features an abstracted eye. The publication featured European and American Surrealists, members of the Latin American avant garde, and young American painters soon to become known as Abstract Expressionists. The artists, among them Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Adolph Gottlieb, Stanley William Hayter, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Anne Ryan, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Rufino Tamayo, and Mark Tobey, as well as art editor and co-publisher John Stephan himself, range across the cultural forefront of the post-war period.
John Walter Stephan was an early member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. He was born in Chicago and studied art at the University of Illinois and the Art Institute of Chicago. He created mosaics for a number of buildings in the Chicago area under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration. After World War II, he and his first wife, Ruth Walgreen, moved to New York City, where he had solo exhibitions at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio; the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City and the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island. His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Loyola University in Chicago and numerous other institutions.
The monumental achievement of Stephan's disc paintings stands on the solid foundation of a lifetime of artistic accomplishment. Having painted urban landscapes and worked as a WPA artist through the 1930s, John Stephan truly came of age as an artist after World War II. An important figure in the development of Abstract Expressionism, Stephan showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery and counted among his close associates Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.
With poet (and then wife) Ruth Stephan, he published The Tiger's Eye, an influential "little magazine" that chronicled the creative ferment of the period. Inspired by William Blake's "Tyger," the title symbolized the editors' faith in the power of creative vision, as did John Stephan's design for the cover which prominently features an abstracted eye. The publication featured European and American Surrealists, members of the Latin American avant garde, and young American painters soon to become known as Abstract Expressionists. The artists, among them Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Adolph Gottlieb, Stanley William Hayter, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Anne Ryan, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Rufino Tamayo, and Mark Tobey, as well as art editor and co-publisher John Stephan himself, range across the cultural forefront of the post-war period.
John Walter Stephan was an early member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. He was born in Chicago and studied art at the University of Illinois and the Art Institute of Chicago. He created mosaics for a number of buildings in the Chicago area under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration. After World War II, he and his first wife, Ruth Walgreen, moved to New York City, where he had solo exhibitions at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio; the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City and the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island. His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Loyola University in Chicago and numerous other institutions.
Beulah Stevenson Beulah Stevenson was born in 1895 in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where she lived and worked until her death. She studied at Pratt Institute, then later at the Art Student's League with John Sloan, who exposed her to American Scene painting and social realism. Sloan encouraged her to visit Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she acquired a second residence in the late 1950s .
In the 1940s, Stevenson studied with German painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, leading her to adopt modernism and a personal form of abstract expressionism.
Stevenson was a printmaker, painter, illustrator, teacher, as well as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. She maintained active membership in a range of artist's organizations including the New York Society of Woman Artists (president), National Association of Women Artists (board member from 1949), Brooklyn Society of Artists (vice-president), Art Institute of Chicago, International Graphic Society Inc., Philadelphia Print Club, Provincetown Art Association and the Creative Artist's Association. She was a member of the American Artist Congress which endorsed government support of art unions and promoted the social-realist style of American scene painting. When the Congress' affiliation with the Communist Party increased, Stevenson left it to join the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, established to promote avant-garde art.
Among the solo shows of Stevenson's career were exhibitions at the Fifteen Gallery, Morris Gallery, Laurel Gallery and Santa Fe Museum of Art, as well as abroad in Paris and London. She also participated in numerous group shows including the Art Institute of Chicago; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Print Club of Philadelphia; National Arts Club, New York; and in Paris.
Stevenson's dynamic oeuvre embraced diverse subject matter including views of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Santa Fe landscape, rural landscapes and genre scenes, as well as the abstract and modernist images of her later work.
According to the New World Telegram review of a 1938 Fifteen Gallery group show, Stevenson was "the liveliest and least conventional member of the group, contributing several prints and drawings marked by vivid almost busy angular patterns." The Evening Post commented on the lithographs in a 1931 solo show as "a medium in which the artist is at home and expresses a delightful version of the subjects which she depicts . . . There is a witty note in them all, a rich vein of personal expression which is pleasant to encounter." Stevenson's fusion of realism and abstraction was progressively modernist for its time, causing critics to remark on her "objective abstraction" and the manner in which she "looks to nature for her impetus, but prefers to record its essence more than its actuality" (Herald Tribune, January 16, 1938). Although her work clearly presents a cubist vernacular in its dissolution and juxtaposition of forms, the underlying structure of her images retains a faithfulness to literal representation. The vitality of this union of styles and Stevenson's perpetually optimistic outlook brought her popular success as well as recognition from her peers; critics described her as "an experimenter in originality" and a "Happy Modernist."
She was the recipient of many awards for her work, notably from the Society of Women Artists, American Society of Contemporary Woman Artists, National Association of Woman Artists and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Her work is included in numerous museum and public collections including the New York Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D,C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Bates College Museum of Art ,Lewiston, Maine; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, Indiana; and the Library of Congress, among others.
In the 1940s, Stevenson studied with German painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts, leading her to adopt modernism and a personal form of abstract expressionism.
Stevenson was a printmaker, painter, illustrator, teacher, as well as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. She maintained active membership in a range of artist's organizations including the New York Society of Woman Artists (president), National Association of Women Artists (board member from 1949), Brooklyn Society of Artists (vice-president), Art Institute of Chicago, International Graphic Society Inc., Philadelphia Print Club, Provincetown Art Association and the Creative Artist's Association. She was a member of the American Artist Congress which endorsed government support of art unions and promoted the social-realist style of American scene painting. When the Congress' affiliation with the Communist Party increased, Stevenson left it to join the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, established to promote avant-garde art.
Among the solo shows of Stevenson's career were exhibitions at the Fifteen Gallery, Morris Gallery, Laurel Gallery and Santa Fe Museum of Art, as well as abroad in Paris and London. She also participated in numerous group shows including the Art Institute of Chicago; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Print Club of Philadelphia; National Arts Club, New York; and in Paris.
Stevenson's dynamic oeuvre embraced diverse subject matter including views of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Santa Fe landscape, rural landscapes and genre scenes, as well as the abstract and modernist images of her later work.
According to the New World Telegram review of a 1938 Fifteen Gallery group show, Stevenson was "the liveliest and least conventional member of the group, contributing several prints and drawings marked by vivid almost busy angular patterns." The Evening Post commented on the lithographs in a 1931 solo show as "a medium in which the artist is at home and expresses a delightful version of the subjects which she depicts . . . There is a witty note in them all, a rich vein of personal expression which is pleasant to encounter." Stevenson's fusion of realism and abstraction was progressively modernist for its time, causing critics to remark on her "objective abstraction" and the manner in which she "looks to nature for her impetus, but prefers to record its essence more than its actuality" (Herald Tribune, January 16, 1938). Although her work clearly presents a cubist vernacular in its dissolution and juxtaposition of forms, the underlying structure of her images retains a faithfulness to literal representation. The vitality of this union of styles and Stevenson's perpetually optimistic outlook brought her popular success as well as recognition from her peers; critics described her as "an experimenter in originality" and a "Happy Modernist."
She was the recipient of many awards for her work, notably from the Society of Women Artists, American Society of Contemporary Woman Artists, National Association of Woman Artists and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Her work is included in numerous museum and public collections including the New York Public Library; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D,C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Bates College Museum of Art ,Lewiston, Maine; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indianapolis, Indiana; and the Library of Congress, among others.
Ary Stillman Ary Stillman (February 13, 1891 – January 28, 1967) was a representational and abstract Russian-American painter born in Hresk near Slutsk, Belarus. He excelled in art as a youth, and after graduating from school he was accepted into the Imperial School of Art in Vilna.
Stillman immigrated to the United States with his family after less than two years at the Imperial School, landing in Sioux City, Iowa at the age of 16. He worked in a local jewelry store to help his family pay the bills, but spent every moment he could painting. After a short stint at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ary once again was on the move, relocating to New York City in 1919 at the age of 28. In New York, he studied at the National Academy of Design (the predecessor of what is now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts).
Ary once again moved in 1921, this time to Paris, where he lived and worked for 12 years. He soon earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his atmospheric landscapes, as well as his elegant portraits of women. Traveling to North Africa and Palestine, Stillman also created watercolor portraits of individuals from various cultures.
He experienced commercial and artistic success in Paris, including a one-man show at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and regular exhibits at the Salon d'Automne, Salon des Echanges (1932), Salone National des Beaux-Arts and the Salon de Tulleries. Although Stillman was certainly exposed to abstract art as well as the beginnings of the surrealist movement in Paris, he did not immediately embrace these new ideas, responding instead to the impressionists’ experiments with light and atmosphere. While his work had been largely objective until the early 1930s, a careful study of his early art reveals the roots of his later abstract work and shows his interest in the artistic arrangement of shapes to convey a subjective meaning.
Ary Stillman returned to New York in 1933 as a successful and well-known artist.He worked for the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project and became a member of the American Artists’ Congress. Among other galleries, from 1935-1937 Ary exhibited at the Guild Art Gallery owned and directed by Margaret Lefranc. He participated in numerous exhibitions, and his art was well received by the public and the press. His work during this time became more subjective (although still representational), as he became more concerned with his interpretation of the deeper inner content of his subject and less interested with its objective outer form.
In the 1940s he joined contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock in becoming part of the New York School. Stillman focused on smaller works, particularly on paper, and his intaglio experiments with inkless pens, in which automatic white lines only appeared after impressing charcoal or pastels across the paper, led to his own interpretations of Abstract Expressionism.
During the early 1950s Ary had a one-person show every year at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City, but by the mid-1950s - after becoming almost blind in one eye and losing his treasured Manhattan studio to city developers - Ary became depressed. He couldn’t seem to find the right environment to help him out of his depression, trying Paris, Majorca and New York. He spent much of his time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in 1957 he relocated to Cuernavaca, Mexico, moving back and forth between there and Houston, Texas, until his death a decade later.
Ary Stillman died in 1967. Upon his death, the Stillman-Lack foundation was found, in accordance with his instructions, to preserve his work and make it available.
In 2010 Columbia University received from the Stillman-Lack Foundation a collection of art works by Stillman, making Columbia the largest international repository of his works. Of the ninety painting and drawings donated to the University, twenty-five have been allocated as gifts to graduating doctoral candidates in the Department of Art History and Archaeology who are recipients of a Stillman fellowship. The remaining sixty-five paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints are part of the University art collection, housed in and stewarded by Art Properties, Avery Library.
Stillman immigrated to the United States with his family after less than two years at the Imperial School, landing in Sioux City, Iowa at the age of 16. He worked in a local jewelry store to help his family pay the bills, but spent every moment he could painting. After a short stint at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ary once again was on the move, relocating to New York City in 1919 at the age of 28. In New York, he studied at the National Academy of Design (the predecessor of what is now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts).
Ary once again moved in 1921, this time to Paris, where he lived and worked for 12 years. He soon earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his atmospheric landscapes, as well as his elegant portraits of women. Traveling to North Africa and Palestine, Stillman also created watercolor portraits of individuals from various cultures.
He experienced commercial and artistic success in Paris, including a one-man show at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and regular exhibits at the Salon d'Automne, Salon des Echanges (1932), Salone National des Beaux-Arts and the Salon de Tulleries. Although Stillman was certainly exposed to abstract art as well as the beginnings of the surrealist movement in Paris, he did not immediately embrace these new ideas, responding instead to the impressionists’ experiments with light and atmosphere. While his work had been largely objective until the early 1930s, a careful study of his early art reveals the roots of his later abstract work and shows his interest in the artistic arrangement of shapes to convey a subjective meaning.
Ary Stillman returned to New York in 1933 as a successful and well-known artist.He worked for the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project and became a member of the American Artists’ Congress. Among other galleries, from 1935-1937 Ary exhibited at the Guild Art Gallery owned and directed by Margaret Lefranc. He participated in numerous exhibitions, and his art was well received by the public and the press. His work during this time became more subjective (although still representational), as he became more concerned with his interpretation of the deeper inner content of his subject and less interested with its objective outer form.
In the 1940s he joined contemporaries such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock in becoming part of the New York School. Stillman focused on smaller works, particularly on paper, and his intaglio experiments with inkless pens, in which automatic white lines only appeared after impressing charcoal or pastels across the paper, led to his own interpretations of Abstract Expressionism.
During the early 1950s Ary had a one-person show every year at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City, but by the mid-1950s - after becoming almost blind in one eye and losing his treasured Manhattan studio to city developers - Ary became depressed. He couldn’t seem to find the right environment to help him out of his depression, trying Paris, Majorca and New York. He spent much of his time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and in 1957 he relocated to Cuernavaca, Mexico, moving back and forth between there and Houston, Texas, until his death a decade later.
Ary Stillman died in 1967. Upon his death, the Stillman-Lack foundation was found, in accordance with his instructions, to preserve his work and make it available.
In 2010 Columbia University received from the Stillman-Lack Foundation a collection of art works by Stillman, making Columbia the largest international repository of his works. Of the ninety painting and drawings donated to the University, twenty-five have been allocated as gifts to graduating doctoral candidates in the Department of Art History and Archaeology who are recipients of a Stillman fellowship. The remaining sixty-five paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints are part of the University art collection, housed in and stewarded by Art Properties, Avery Library.
E. Oscar Thalinger E. Oscar Thalinger was born on March 20, 1885 in Riquewihr, Alsace-Lorraine, France. His family emigrated to the United States and at age fifteen, Thalinger enrolled in the Art School in St. Louis, which later became the Fine Arts School of Washington University. There he studied painting and drawing during the day and sculpture at night.
Thalinger became known in the late 1920s and early 1930s for his images of “old St. Louis landmarks and dwellings which had lost their former glory."
Along with other local artists of the twenties and thirties, he sought both inspiration and escape from the city’s problems. During this period he did Regionalist subjects and participated in the Ste. Genevieve Art Colony, a group of painters attracted to the picturesque town of St. Genevieve, Missouri near St. Louis.
In 1933 Thalinger was included in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities at The Museum of Modern Art.
While expanding his subject matter, his style remained the same; however he was intrigued by distortion of perspective and abandonment of realism. French-inspired Cubism and German-inspired Abstract Expressionism may have challenged him while studying in both Paris and Munich during the first decade of the twentieth century.
From that influence, his work went from the social realism of the twenties and thirties to American modernism after the war. Modernism would remain his style, and in 1946 the City Art Museum of St. Louis acquired his work for its permanent collection.
Much of Oscar's later work turned from his former more representational / modernist style towards the abstract. He never laid out a sketch before painting, preferring to work directly with his brush on the canvas. His reasoning for this method was that he did not have time to sketch while he observed; rather he preserved his impressions, which he would record later on canvas, “through color sensations”.
With a career that spanned half a century, Thalinger painted until a stroke impaired his eyesight at the age of 78.
He passed away in 1965 after suffering a second stroke.
Thalinger was a member of the Artists’ Guild, the St. Louis Art League, the 2 x 4 Society and was President of Artists Equity. His work is in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Thalinger became known in the late 1920s and early 1930s for his images of “old St. Louis landmarks and dwellings which had lost their former glory."
Along with other local artists of the twenties and thirties, he sought both inspiration and escape from the city’s problems. During this period he did Regionalist subjects and participated in the Ste. Genevieve Art Colony, a group of painters attracted to the picturesque town of St. Genevieve, Missouri near St. Louis.
In 1933 Thalinger was included in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture from 16 American Cities at The Museum of Modern Art.
While expanding his subject matter, his style remained the same; however he was intrigued by distortion of perspective and abandonment of realism. French-inspired Cubism and German-inspired Abstract Expressionism may have challenged him while studying in both Paris and Munich during the first decade of the twentieth century.
From that influence, his work went from the social realism of the twenties and thirties to American modernism after the war. Modernism would remain his style, and in 1946 the City Art Museum of St. Louis acquired his work for its permanent collection.
Much of Oscar's later work turned from his former more representational / modernist style towards the abstract. He never laid out a sketch before painting, preferring to work directly with his brush on the canvas. His reasoning for this method was that he did not have time to sketch while he observed; rather he preserved his impressions, which he would record later on canvas, “through color sensations”.
With a career that spanned half a century, Thalinger painted until a stroke impaired his eyesight at the age of 78.
He passed away in 1965 after suffering a second stroke.
Thalinger was a member of the Artists’ Guild, the St. Louis Art League, the 2 x 4 Society and was President of Artists Equity. His work is in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Hector Villalobos Hector Villalobos was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1950, and studied in Santiago and Lima, Peru, eventually setting in Venezuela.
Earlier works were inspired by the humid tropical forests of Venezuela, “seen from within the dense tangle of their foliage but painted in increasingly less descriptive and less representative ways. “
Over time, his works became more abstract, and by 1990 his output had “strip (ped) away the formal and chromatic exuberance of his previous works. They are severe, rigorous, energetic, expressive. And oof very good quality.” (Peran Erminy, Galeria Cinco).
Villalobos has had numerous solo and group exhibitions since the early 1970s in galleries throughout Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, and in Florida, U.S. , including Art Miami in 1993.
Group exhibitions include Galeria Viernes and Promociones Boreas, Lima , Peru; Museo de Arte, Guayaquil, Ecuador; Centro de Arte ,Galeria Fidel Angulo and Galeria Praxis, Santiago, Chile; Galeria Durban, Galeria Cinco, Galeria Felix, 1 ° Salon de Artes Visuales and Salon Metro, Caracas, Venezuela; Art Miami, Miami, Florida; Bienal Nacional (Museo de Bellas Artes, Museo de la Rinconada, Caracas, Venezuela).
Solo exhibitions include Galeria Viernes, Lima, Peru; Galeria Fidel Angulo, Santiago, Chile; Galeria Durban, Venezuela (Caracas, Barquisimeto and Maracaibo); Instituto de Cooperacion Iberoamericano de Venezuela, Sala CANTV, Galeria Cinco, and Galeria Bass, Caracas, Venezuela.
Earlier works were inspired by the humid tropical forests of Venezuela, “seen from within the dense tangle of their foliage but painted in increasingly less descriptive and less representative ways. “
Over time, his works became more abstract, and by 1990 his output had “strip (ped) away the formal and chromatic exuberance of his previous works. They are severe, rigorous, energetic, expressive. And oof very good quality.” (Peran Erminy, Galeria Cinco).
Villalobos has had numerous solo and group exhibitions since the early 1970s in galleries throughout Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, and in Florida, U.S. , including Art Miami in 1993.
Group exhibitions include Galeria Viernes and Promociones Boreas, Lima , Peru; Museo de Arte, Guayaquil, Ecuador; Centro de Arte ,Galeria Fidel Angulo and Galeria Praxis, Santiago, Chile; Galeria Durban, Galeria Cinco, Galeria Felix, 1 ° Salon de Artes Visuales and Salon Metro, Caracas, Venezuela; Art Miami, Miami, Florida; Bienal Nacional (Museo de Bellas Artes, Museo de la Rinconada, Caracas, Venezuela).
Solo exhibitions include Galeria Viernes, Lima, Peru; Galeria Fidel Angulo, Santiago, Chile; Galeria Durban, Venezuela (Caracas, Barquisimeto and Maracaibo); Instituto de Cooperacion Iberoamericano de Venezuela, Sala CANTV, Galeria Cinco, and Galeria Bass, Caracas, Venezuela.
Vaclav Vytlacil Vaclav Vytlacil was among the earliest and most influential advocates of Hans Hofmann’s teachings in the United States. Vytlacil, who first met Hofmann in Munich in 1923, had already completed his art studies and had been teaching art for five years. Vytlacil immediately grasped the significance of Hofmann’s ideas. “I quickly realized,” he later recalled, “that this is what I had been searching for.”(1)
As a child, Vytlacil had taken art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1913, he received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with John C. Johansen, an able portraitist whose expressive style resembled that of John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. On completion of his studies in 1916, he accepted a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art. Vytlacil saved enough money to go to Europe in 1921. He hoped to study Céanne’s paintings and the work of Old Masters. He spent a month in Paris, then went to Prague (his parents were Czechoslovakian). He toured Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. The paintings he sought out-works by Rembrandt, Titian, Veronese, Cranach, and Holbein — gave him a new perspective. “I am, for the first, beginning to understand some of the laws the old masters used in their paintings and wonderful things they are too. It was no hit or miss affair with them, neither was it just feeling: but rather real solid laws and facts that not only one used, but they all used.”(2)
In Munich, Vytlacil enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art, where Worth Ryder and Ernest Thurn were fellow students. When Thurn left the Academy for Hofmann’s school, Vytlacil soon followed.(3) Vytlacil worked with Hofmann throughout the mid 1920s, first as a student, and subsequently as a teaching assistant. With Thurn, he organized Hofmann’s 1924 summer school on the island of Capri.
The contact with Hofmann made Vytlacil reconsider his own artistic approach. “More and more I realize that drawing is the bottom of it all and to paint without being able to draw leads only to grief.”(4)
Vytlacil returned to the United States in 1928. During the summer of that year, at Ryder’s invitation, he gave a series of lectures on modern European art at the University of California at Berkeley. The next fall he joined the faculty of the Art Students League. Although he encountered opposition from Reginald Marsh, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the league, Vytlacil gave a series of public lectures on modern art that had lasting importance. George L.K. Morris was only one of many young Americans lured into modernism after hearing Vytlacil speak.
Vytlacil returned to Europe after a season at the league. In Munich he attempted to interest Hofmann in teaching at the league. He then set up a studio in Paris, where he gained first-hand knowledge of Picasso, Matisse, and Dufy. Over the next six years, Vytlacil divided his time between Paris, Capri, and Positano. In 1931, he took a five-year lease on a villa in Positano and opened an informal school. He returned to New York in 1935, and the following year helped found the American Abstract Artists. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, he taught at a variety of places — the Art Students League, Queens College in New York, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and other art schools. In 1946, he rejoined the faculty of the Art Students League and remained there until his retirement in 1978.(5)
Even before Vytlacil went to Europe, his paintings showed a decided inclination toward modernism. In the expressionistic Village Scene of 1918, and other work from the the same decade, Vytlacil compressed space and balanced his compositions through an adroit use of color. His still lifes and interiors from the 1920s reflect an understanding of Céanne gleaned partly from his discussions with Hofmann:
“No one in my former period of training had ever spoken of the properties of the two-dimensional plane, that planes built volumes, not lines, that volumes were three-dimensional and that the negative space in which they exist also has a three-dimensional volume.”(6)
During the 1930s, Vytlacil pursued two distinct and very different kinds of art simultaneously. Landscapes and cityscapes of the early 1930s, such as City Scene #10 and Theater District, merge Cubist-inspired spatial concerns with an expressionistic approach to line and color. He also began doing constructions. These were usually of discarded wood from a department store opposite his studio. He occasionally added cardboard, string, metal, and cork to these works.(7) Though he experimented with constructions for several years, Vytlacil eventually gave them up as too limiting. He continued to prefer the spatial challenges of painting. Over the years Vytlacil occasionally ventured into complete nonobjectivity; still most of his work is abstracted from recognizable subjects.
During the 1940s and 1950s there was a new found freedom in Vytlacil’s paintings. Energy replaced form as primary concern, and his subjects — landscapes, still lifes, the human figure — possessed a spontaneity unsuspected from his earlier work.
1. Vaclav Vytlacil, interview with Leontine Zimiles, in Joan Marter, Beyond the Plane: American Constructions, 1930 – 1965 (Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey State Museum, 1983), p. 96.
2. Vaclav Vytlacil, letter to Elizabeth Foster, his future wife, 5 January 1922, Vaclav Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., roll D295: 259. (This letter was probably written on 5 January 1923, since another, dated 5 January 1922, indicates that Vytlacil had just arrived in Prague, after a month in Paris.)
3. Lawrence Campbell, “Introduction,” Vaclav Vytlacil: Paintings and Constructions from 1930 (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1975), p. 3, describes Thurn’s situation. Thurn was forced to leave the Royal Academy when the Bavarian Ministry of Culture decided to limit the age of students to thirty-five. To retain his visa, Thurn had to find alternative, approved instruction. He discovered Hofmann’s school, which had police permission to accept students of any age and nationality.
4. Vytlacil, letter to Elizabeth Foster, January 1925, Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art, roll D‑295: 288.
5. The most thorough chronology of Vytlacil’s life can be found in the Montclair Art Museum publication.
6. Worden Day, interview with Vaclav Vytlacil, Montclair, New Jersey, 1975, Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art.
7. Vytlacil began making constructions after seeing those of his friend and former student Rupert Turnbull. He worked closely with Turnbull in Positano, where the two experimented with tempera painting. Their explorations were published in Rupert D. Turnbull and Vaclav Vytlacil, Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935).
Virginia M. Mecklenburg The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930 – 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989)
Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum
As a child, Vytlacil had taken art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1913, he received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he worked with John C. Johansen, an able portraitist whose expressive style resembled that of John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn. On completion of his studies in 1916, he accepted a teaching position at the Minneapolis School of Art. Vytlacil saved enough money to go to Europe in 1921. He hoped to study Céanne’s paintings and the work of Old Masters. He spent a month in Paris, then went to Prague (his parents were Czechoslovakian). He toured Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. The paintings he sought out-works by Rembrandt, Titian, Veronese, Cranach, and Holbein — gave him a new perspective. “I am, for the first, beginning to understand some of the laws the old masters used in their paintings and wonderful things they are too. It was no hit or miss affair with them, neither was it just feeling: but rather real solid laws and facts that not only one used, but they all used.”(2)
In Munich, Vytlacil enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art, where Worth Ryder and Ernest Thurn were fellow students. When Thurn left the Academy for Hofmann’s school, Vytlacil soon followed.(3) Vytlacil worked with Hofmann throughout the mid 1920s, first as a student, and subsequently as a teaching assistant. With Thurn, he organized Hofmann’s 1924 summer school on the island of Capri.
The contact with Hofmann made Vytlacil reconsider his own artistic approach. “More and more I realize that drawing is the bottom of it all and to paint without being able to draw leads only to grief.”(4)
Vytlacil returned to the United States in 1928. During the summer of that year, at Ryder’s invitation, he gave a series of lectures on modern European art at the University of California at Berkeley. The next fall he joined the faculty of the Art Students League. Although he encountered opposition from Reginald Marsh, Boardman Robinson, and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the league, Vytlacil gave a series of public lectures on modern art that had lasting importance. George L.K. Morris was only one of many young Americans lured into modernism after hearing Vytlacil speak.
Vytlacil returned to Europe after a season at the league. In Munich he attempted to interest Hofmann in teaching at the league. He then set up a studio in Paris, where he gained first-hand knowledge of Picasso, Matisse, and Dufy. Over the next six years, Vytlacil divided his time between Paris, Capri, and Positano. In 1931, he took a five-year lease on a villa in Positano and opened an informal school. He returned to New York in 1935, and the following year helped found the American Abstract Artists. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, he taught at a variety of places — the Art Students League, Queens College in New York, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and other art schools. In 1946, he rejoined the faculty of the Art Students League and remained there until his retirement in 1978.(5)
Even before Vytlacil went to Europe, his paintings showed a decided inclination toward modernism. In the expressionistic Village Scene of 1918, and other work from the the same decade, Vytlacil compressed space and balanced his compositions through an adroit use of color. His still lifes and interiors from the 1920s reflect an understanding of Céanne gleaned partly from his discussions with Hofmann:
“No one in my former period of training had ever spoken of the properties of the two-dimensional plane, that planes built volumes, not lines, that volumes were three-dimensional and that the negative space in which they exist also has a three-dimensional volume.”(6)
During the 1930s, Vytlacil pursued two distinct and very different kinds of art simultaneously. Landscapes and cityscapes of the early 1930s, such as City Scene #10 and Theater District, merge Cubist-inspired spatial concerns with an expressionistic approach to line and color. He also began doing constructions. These were usually of discarded wood from a department store opposite his studio. He occasionally added cardboard, string, metal, and cork to these works.(7) Though he experimented with constructions for several years, Vytlacil eventually gave them up as too limiting. He continued to prefer the spatial challenges of painting. Over the years Vytlacil occasionally ventured into complete nonobjectivity; still most of his work is abstracted from recognizable subjects.
During the 1940s and 1950s there was a new found freedom in Vytlacil’s paintings. Energy replaced form as primary concern, and his subjects — landscapes, still lifes, the human figure — possessed a spontaneity unsuspected from his earlier work.
1. Vaclav Vytlacil, interview with Leontine Zimiles, in Joan Marter, Beyond the Plane: American Constructions, 1930 – 1965 (Trenton, N.J.: New Jersey State Museum, 1983), p. 96.
2. Vaclav Vytlacil, letter to Elizabeth Foster, his future wife, 5 January 1922, Vaclav Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., roll D295: 259. (This letter was probably written on 5 January 1923, since another, dated 5 January 1922, indicates that Vytlacil had just arrived in Prague, after a month in Paris.)
3. Lawrence Campbell, “Introduction,” Vaclav Vytlacil: Paintings and Constructions from 1930 (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1975), p. 3, describes Thurn’s situation. Thurn was forced to leave the Royal Academy when the Bavarian Ministry of Culture decided to limit the age of students to thirty-five. To retain his visa, Thurn had to find alternative, approved instruction. He discovered Hofmann’s school, which had police permission to accept students of any age and nationality.
4. Vytlacil, letter to Elizabeth Foster, January 1925, Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art, roll D‑295: 288.
5. The most thorough chronology of Vytlacil’s life can be found in the Montclair Art Museum publication.
6. Worden Day, interview with Vaclav Vytlacil, Montclair, New Jersey, 1975, Vytlacil Papers, Archives of American Art.
7. Vytlacil began making constructions after seeing those of his friend and former student Rupert Turnbull. He worked closely with Turnbull in Positano, where the two experimented with tempera painting. Their explorations were published in Rupert D. Turnbull and Vaclav Vytlacil, Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935).
Virginia M. Mecklenburg The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930 – 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1989)
Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Abraham Walkowitz Abraham Walkowitz was born in Siberia, Russia, a turn-of-the century immigrant to the United States who grew up in New York's Lower East Side. He first studied art at the Educational Alliance, the Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design. In 1906, he journeyed to Europe where he studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. Upon his return to the United States in 1907 he became a fully-fledged convert to Modernism, and his first exhibit, at the Haas Gallery in that year, brought him a measure of notoriety, as well as the attention of Stieglitz and other pioneers of Non-Objective art.
Walkowitz is perhaps best known for his watercolor studies of Isadora Duncan and the dance. However, Walkowitz laid claim to being the first to exhibit truly Modernist paintings in the United States. After 1909, he became an intimate of Alfred Stieglitz' 291 Gallery, and whilst there became a participant in the debate over Modern Art in America. Walkowitz was an outspoken proponent of the continuous experimentation in the arts, which was his definition of Modernism. As an artist, Walkowitz embodied the changing role of the Modernist painter in the United States, as Modernism moved from avant-garde protest against established modes to become an accepted style and tradition.
As a result of this early attention, by the time of the Armory Show of 1913 to which Walkowitz contributed several paintings, his work was widely known to both fellow Modernists as well as their opponents. Walkowitz was clearly part of the new vocabulary of American art and criticism.
During the 1920s and 1930s, as the first generation Modernists lost their revolutionary cast, and as American Realism gained in favor, Walkowitz continued his experiments with form and line, especially in his series of Duncan studies. Although his paintings received less critical attention than they once had, Walkowitz was clearly one of the grand old folk of American Modernism. During the Depression, Walkowitz was politically active on behalf of unemployed artists supporting various New Deal initiatives in the Arts.
In 1945, Walkowitz travelled to Kansas where he painted landscapes made up largely of strip mines and barns. This was to be his last venture in active painting for, by 1946, the glaucoma which led to his eventual blindness began to impair his vision and limit his ability to work. Walkowitz then turned to the preparation of a series of volumes of his drawings, designed to illustrate the development of Modernism in the Twentieth Century, and in so doing, established his role as a pioneer American Modernist.
Selected Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN
Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, MI
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Walkowitz is perhaps best known for his watercolor studies of Isadora Duncan and the dance. However, Walkowitz laid claim to being the first to exhibit truly Modernist paintings in the United States. After 1909, he became an intimate of Alfred Stieglitz' 291 Gallery, and whilst there became a participant in the debate over Modern Art in America. Walkowitz was an outspoken proponent of the continuous experimentation in the arts, which was his definition of Modernism. As an artist, Walkowitz embodied the changing role of the Modernist painter in the United States, as Modernism moved from avant-garde protest against established modes to become an accepted style and tradition.
As a result of this early attention, by the time of the Armory Show of 1913 to which Walkowitz contributed several paintings, his work was widely known to both fellow Modernists as well as their opponents. Walkowitz was clearly part of the new vocabulary of American art and criticism.
During the 1920s and 1930s, as the first generation Modernists lost their revolutionary cast, and as American Realism gained in favor, Walkowitz continued his experiments with form and line, especially in his series of Duncan studies. Although his paintings received less critical attention than they once had, Walkowitz was clearly one of the grand old folk of American Modernism. During the Depression, Walkowitz was politically active on behalf of unemployed artists supporting various New Deal initiatives in the Arts.
In 1945, Walkowitz travelled to Kansas where he painted landscapes made up largely of strip mines and barns. This was to be his last venture in active painting for, by 1946, the glaucoma which led to his eventual blindness began to impair his vision and limit his ability to work. Walkowitz then turned to the preparation of a series of volumes of his drawings, designed to illustrate the development of Modernism in the Twentieth Century, and in so doing, established his role as a pioneer American Modernist.
Selected Public Collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, CO
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX
Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN
Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, MI
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Jerry Walter Jerry Walter was an abstract expressionist artist whose output of energetic and colorful paintings were the products of the rich artistic milieu of post-war New York City.
He was born Harold Frank Walter in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on November 25, 1915. After graduating from Colgate University in 1937, Walter moved to New York City, where he studied drawing and painting at the New School and the Art Students’ League. Before concentrating seriously on his art, he spent several years as a successful copywriter and idea man for the advertising agencies of J. Walter Thompson, McCann Ericson, and BBDO. During this time, he also worked as a syndicated cartoonist. Collaborating with his wife, Linda, his best-known series was Susie Q. Smith, which first appeared in 1945 and described as a “female Archie type.” Very popular, the cartoon was the subject of a series of comic books published from 1951 to 1954.
After serving in the United States Army for three years during World War II, Walter began to paint seriously. He ascribed his earliest artistic influence to Joan Miró, whose Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) he viewed when he was twelve, the year he published his first cartoon. Walter later wrote that jazz, “the first native expression of so-called modernism” was a strong influence on his work. The artist saw abstract painting as a “working-through [of the] self . . . an emotional square-search in paint for the truth.” He further added that abstract art might become a cultural force to restore society’s emotional stability, a place where “everyone and everything [was] part of a wild, sad, strange, beautiful dynamic dissonance.”
During the later 1940s, Walter spent time at the Research Studio in Maitland, Florida. Founded in 1937 by artist and architect J. André Smith and supported by the philanthropist Mary Curtis Bok, the Research Studio was a lively colony that hosted prominent artists, including Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, and Doris Lee. While at the Studio, Walter’s work was purchased by Frank Crowninsheild. A founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and editor of Vanity Fair, Crowinshield was a noted collector; his collection included important works by Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Degas, Bellows, and Bonnard.
Returning to New York after his time at the Studio, Walter became an active member of the New York school of the abstract expressionist movement, and in the summer of 1956, Walter exhibited 13 paintings and a selection of drawings at New York’s Chase Gallery. The adroit manipulation of both color and composition evident in his work shows the influence of Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hoffman.
His works are in the collections of numerous private and public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University and have been exhibited at Chase Gallery, New York, among others.
He was born Harold Frank Walter in Mount Pleasant, Iowa on November 25, 1915. After graduating from Colgate University in 1937, Walter moved to New York City, where he studied drawing and painting at the New School and the Art Students’ League. Before concentrating seriously on his art, he spent several years as a successful copywriter and idea man for the advertising agencies of J. Walter Thompson, McCann Ericson, and BBDO. During this time, he also worked as a syndicated cartoonist. Collaborating with his wife, Linda, his best-known series was Susie Q. Smith, which first appeared in 1945 and described as a “female Archie type.” Very popular, the cartoon was the subject of a series of comic books published from 1951 to 1954.
After serving in the United States Army for three years during World War II, Walter began to paint seriously. He ascribed his earliest artistic influence to Joan Miró, whose Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) he viewed when he was twelve, the year he published his first cartoon. Walter later wrote that jazz, “the first native expression of so-called modernism” was a strong influence on his work. The artist saw abstract painting as a “working-through [of the] self . . . an emotional square-search in paint for the truth.” He further added that abstract art might become a cultural force to restore society’s emotional stability, a place where “everyone and everything [was] part of a wild, sad, strange, beautiful dynamic dissonance.”
During the later 1940s, Walter spent time at the Research Studio in Maitland, Florida. Founded in 1937 by artist and architect J. André Smith and supported by the philanthropist Mary Curtis Bok, the Research Studio was a lively colony that hosted prominent artists, including Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, and Doris Lee. While at the Studio, Walter’s work was purchased by Frank Crowninsheild. A founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and editor of Vanity Fair, Crowinshield was a noted collector; his collection included important works by Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Degas, Bellows, and Bonnard.
Returning to New York after his time at the Studio, Walter became an active member of the New York school of the abstract expressionist movement, and in the summer of 1956, Walter exhibited 13 paintings and a selection of drawings at New York’s Chase Gallery. The adroit manipulation of both color and composition evident in his work shows the influence of Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Hans Hoffman.
His works are in the collections of numerous private and public institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University and have been exhibited at Chase Gallery, New York, among others.
Max Weber Max Weber was born in 1881 in Bialystok, Russia, and came to the United States at the age of ten. Weber spent his childhood in New York, then four years studying art in Paris before permanently settling in New York in 1909. It is not a coincidence that the "Cubist decade" of 1910-1920 began with Weber's return to New York.
He was one of the first Americans to bring modernism to the United States, and the style of his work beginning in 1910 was very Cubist. Needless to say, critics did not welcome this new approach, mostly because they did not understand it. Artists, on the other hand, found the works inspirational and very intellectual.
Weber's most popular paintings were of New York. He saw New York, and the city in general, as a symbol of intellectual, cultural, and technological sophistication. It is somewhat ironic, then, given the complexities of a city and the technology that inhabits it, that Cubism broke those elements down to the spare, essential shapes and forms.
Weber tired of Cubism after 1920 and subsequently developed a more realistic style. Throughout his artistic career, Weber had many friends who were photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz. Photography influenced Weber's art, both in his Cubist stage and afterwards. Photography has the ability (or limitation) of making three-dimensional objects two-dimensional. Cubism was a movement that had dimension as a key aspect, as did realism although in a very different manner.
Weber's pioneering work in America was a result of many influences. Weber took from Henri Matisse his use of color, Paul Cezanne's use of space, and Pablo Picasso's proto-cubist style. Despite these well-known influences, Weber was able to carve out a niche for himself in the aforementioned cityscapes.
Emerson Woelffer Emerson Woelffer (July 27, 1914 – February 2, 2003) was a prominent abstract expressionist artist and painter born in Chicago. He studied Education at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1935 and 1937. In 1938 he joined the WPA Arts Program. Woelffer subsequently studied at the Institute of Design under Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. and earned a B.A. Degree and taught there in 1942. In 1949 he taught at Black Mountain College at the request of Buckminster Fuller. Between 1949 and 1959, he lived in Yucatán, Mexico and Forio d'Ischia Naples, Italy. Later he was instrumental in bringing modernism to Los Angeles where he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal Arts) from 1959 to 1973. From 1974 and 1992 he taught at The Otis Art Institute (now called Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles, serving as Chair of the Painting Department from 1974 to 1978. In 1970, Woelffer was artist-in-residence at the Honolulu Museum of Art. He received the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 1984 and the Francis J. Greenburger Award, in conjunction with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York City in 1988. In 1991 he received an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He felt such a strong attachment to Otis that he left his estate to the college to set up a scholarship fund to benefit future artists. Emerson Woelffer died in Los Angeles in 2003.
Emerson Woelffer is best known for his boldly colored abstract paintings and collages with jagged forms. He also created sculpture and lithographs. Late in his career―suffering from macular degeneration―he began working in white crayon on black paper. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, Colorado ), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Montana Historical Society (Helena, Montana), the Museum of Art (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla, California), the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase College, Purchase, New York), the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), the Portland Art Museum (Portland, Oregon), the San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, California), Yellowstone Art Museum (Billings, Montana), and the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, North Carolina) are among the public collections holding work by Woelffer.
Retrospectives of his work were held at the Santa Barbara Museum in 1964, the Phillips Collection in 1974, and the Otis Gallery in 1992. During his lifetime, exhibition venues included the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Biennial, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy.
Emerson Woelffer is best known for his boldly colored abstract paintings and collages with jagged forms. He also created sculpture and lithographs. Late in his career―suffering from macular degeneration―he began working in white crayon on black paper. The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (Colorado Springs, Colorado ), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Montana Historical Society (Helena, Montana), the Museum of Art (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (La Jolla, California), the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase College, Purchase, New York), the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma), the Portland Art Museum (Portland, Oregon), the San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, California), Yellowstone Art Museum (Billings, Montana), and the Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, North Carolina) are among the public collections holding work by Woelffer.
Retrospectives of his work were held at the Santa Barbara Museum in 1964, the Phillips Collection in 1974, and the Otis Gallery in 1992. During his lifetime, exhibition venues included the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Biennial, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy.
Carl Woolsey
Jean Xceron Jean Xceron, Greek by birth, came to the United States when he was fourteen years old. For the next six years he lived and worked with relatives in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and New York City. In 1910, determined to be an artist, he moved to Washington, D.C., and enrolled in classes at the Corcoran School of Art.
He, like many of his artist peers, was much influenced by the 1913 Armory Show, a venue that made provided many Americans their first exposure to modernist or abstract art, much of it imported from France. At that time, Xceron was affiliated with the artists around Alfred Stieglitz, who was about the only promoter of modern art in America, something he did through his New York City Gallery 291. Borrowing some of the abstract Armory Show works that Stieglitz had obtained, Xceron and some colleagues staged their own exhibition in Washington DC. This marked him and his group as being rebels, that is in violation of academic methods prescribed by those who set those standards at the National Academy of Design.
Underscoring Xceron's commitment to non-traditional artwork was his membership in the Society of Independent Artists as well as his close association with Cubist painter Max Weber, Futurist painter Joseph Stella, and Dada Greek poet, Theodoros Dorros.
In 1920, Xceron moved to New York and became friends with Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, and Joseph Stella. He exhibited in the New York Independents' exhibitions in 1921 and 1922. In New York, Xceron studied Céanne and read as much as possible about new artistic movements abroad.
Of him during this period, it was written that his artistic role was "a vital link between what is commonly termed as the first-generation (the Stieglitz group, the Synchromists, etc.) and second-generation, the American Abstract Artists, the Transcendental Painting Group . . ." (Vrachopoulos) .
Xceron was finally able to travel to Paris in 1927. There he began writing art reviews for the European editions of the Chicago Herald Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Boston Evening Transcript. . His articles on Jean Hélion, Hans Arp, John Graham, Theo Van Doesburg, and other artists showed his increasingly sophisticated understanding of recent art.
In this capacity, he became a link as a writer between the European avant-garde and the American public, but he also did much artwork that aligned him with the French modernist movements.
Members of the Parisian Greek community became aware of Xceron's talents, and Christian Zervos, editor of the influential magazine Cahiers d'Art, arranged a solo exhibition at the Galèrie de France in 1931. Visitors to this first exhibition saw an artist who was working his way through Cubism. Still-life and figural motifs remained prominent, but the artist was striving to capture rhythmic and fluid movement rather than solid form. Over the next several years, Xceron moved away from his figural foundations, introducing at first gridlike structural patterns and, by the mid 1930s, planar arrangements of severe Constructivist purity. By the time he returned to the United States, his work was totally abstract. In 1938, he joined the American Abstract Artists, a group that was quite controversial in the 1940s and 50s in America because it was so different from the prevalent American Scene painting.
Many of the Europeans artists fleeing Europe became associated with Xceron in New York City during the war years of the 1940s such as Fernand Leger and Piet Mondrian. In fact, Xceron was the person Mondrian first wrote to when he decided to leave Europe and needed help.
When Xceron returned to New York in 1935 for an exhibition at the Garland Gallery, he was among the inner circle of Abstraction-Création and other leading Parisian art groups. He again visited New York in 1937 for a show at Nierendorf Gallery. Although planning only a visit, his move proved permanent and Xceron soon joined the American Abstract Artists, who welcomed him as a leading Parisian artist. Despite his increasing reputation, however, he fared little better commercially than did his new colleagues. He was hired by the WPA Federal Art Project and executed an abstract mural for the chapel at Riker's Island Penitentiary.
Xceron's work was added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1940s and 1950s, he was employed in a Registrar capacity by Hilla Rebay at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In that position, he was able to do his own painting as well in his spare time, and he had gallery exhibitions and regular exposure at the Guggenheim in their non-objective shows. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his work reflected Abstract Expressionism such as in the painting commission, Radar, he did for the University of Georgia.
Jean Xceron died in 1967.
Sources: Virginia M. Mecklenburg via Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art; AskArt
He, like many of his artist peers, was much influenced by the 1913 Armory Show, a venue that made provided many Americans their first exposure to modernist or abstract art, much of it imported from France. At that time, Xceron was affiliated with the artists around Alfred Stieglitz, who was about the only promoter of modern art in America, something he did through his New York City Gallery 291. Borrowing some of the abstract Armory Show works that Stieglitz had obtained, Xceron and some colleagues staged their own exhibition in Washington DC. This marked him and his group as being rebels, that is in violation of academic methods prescribed by those who set those standards at the National Academy of Design.
Underscoring Xceron's commitment to non-traditional artwork was his membership in the Society of Independent Artists as well as his close association with Cubist painter Max Weber, Futurist painter Joseph Stella, and Dada Greek poet, Theodoros Dorros.
In 1920, Xceron moved to New York and became friends with Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Max Weber, Abraham Walkowitz, and Joseph Stella. He exhibited in the New York Independents' exhibitions in 1921 and 1922. In New York, Xceron studied Céanne and read as much as possible about new artistic movements abroad.
Of him during this period, it was written that his artistic role was "a vital link between what is commonly termed as the first-generation (the Stieglitz group, the Synchromists, etc.) and second-generation, the American Abstract Artists, the Transcendental Painting Group . . ." (Vrachopoulos) .
Xceron was finally able to travel to Paris in 1927. There he began writing art reviews for the European editions of the Chicago Herald Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Boston Evening Transcript. . His articles on Jean Hélion, Hans Arp, John Graham, Theo Van Doesburg, and other artists showed his increasingly sophisticated understanding of recent art.
In this capacity, he became a link as a writer between the European avant-garde and the American public, but he also did much artwork that aligned him with the French modernist movements.
Members of the Parisian Greek community became aware of Xceron's talents, and Christian Zervos, editor of the influential magazine Cahiers d'Art, arranged a solo exhibition at the Galèrie de France in 1931. Visitors to this first exhibition saw an artist who was working his way through Cubism. Still-life and figural motifs remained prominent, but the artist was striving to capture rhythmic and fluid movement rather than solid form. Over the next several years, Xceron moved away from his figural foundations, introducing at first gridlike structural patterns and, by the mid 1930s, planar arrangements of severe Constructivist purity. By the time he returned to the United States, his work was totally abstract. In 1938, he joined the American Abstract Artists, a group that was quite controversial in the 1940s and 50s in America because it was so different from the prevalent American Scene painting.
Many of the Europeans artists fleeing Europe became associated with Xceron in New York City during the war years of the 1940s such as Fernand Leger and Piet Mondrian. In fact, Xceron was the person Mondrian first wrote to when he decided to leave Europe and needed help.
When Xceron returned to New York in 1935 for an exhibition at the Garland Gallery, he was among the inner circle of Abstraction-Création and other leading Parisian art groups. He again visited New York in 1937 for a show at Nierendorf Gallery. Although planning only a visit, his move proved permanent and Xceron soon joined the American Abstract Artists, who welcomed him as a leading Parisian artist. Despite his increasing reputation, however, he fared little better commercially than did his new colleagues. He was hired by the WPA Federal Art Project and executed an abstract mural for the chapel at Riker's Island Penitentiary.
Xceron's work was added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1940s and 1950s, he was employed in a Registrar capacity by Hilla Rebay at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In that position, he was able to do his own painting as well in his spare time, and he had gallery exhibitions and regular exposure at the Guggenheim in their non-objective shows. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, his work reflected Abstract Expressionism such as in the painting commission, Radar, he did for the University of Georgia.
Jean Xceron died in 1967.
Sources: Virginia M. Mecklenburg via Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art; AskArt
Taro Yamamoto Taro Yamamoto was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York City during the 1950s. He was born in Hollywood, California in 1919 but was sent to Japan at the age of eight to receive a traditional Japanese education. His family was descended from a long line of Shinto priests. During his education he began painting and by the time he reached high school he decided to make art his life.
Taro Yamamoto’s prolific career began at a young age. By the age of ten, he was already painting landscapes and still lifes in oil, and had won numerous prizes in exhibitions at school. In 1941 he joined the U.S. Army and served during World War II. After being discharged from the service he returned to California. In 1949 Glenn Wessel, a student of Hans Hofmann, convinced him to New York. There he worked with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Vaclav Vytlacil, Byron Brown, Reginald Marsh, and Morris Kantor.
In 1952 he won a John Sloan Fellowship from the Art Students League. The next year he traveled to Europe under a Edward G. MacDowell Traveling Fellowship where he practices in Stuttgard, Germany with Willy Baumeister. He also exhibited at Gallerie Huit in Paris. In 1954 Yamamoto was invited to a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. There he worked with Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko developing a unique abstract expressionist style. Later in his life he devoted himself to hard-edge painting.
Yamamoto had an extensive exhibition career including the Stable Gallery, Art Students League, Krasner Gallery, Westerly Gallery and Riverside Museum in New York; the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Guild Hall in Easthampton, Miami Museum of Modern Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the University of Minnesota, Wellfleet Art Studio, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Parrish Art Museum in Southampton along with many others.
Biography courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL
Taro Yamamoto’s prolific career began at a young age. By the age of ten, he was already painting landscapes and still lifes in oil, and had won numerous prizes in exhibitions at school. In 1941 he joined the U.S. Army and served during World War II. After being discharged from the service he returned to California. In 1949 Glenn Wessel, a student of Hans Hofmann, convinced him to New York. There he worked with Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Vaclav Vytlacil, Byron Brown, Reginald Marsh, and Morris Kantor.
In 1952 he won a John Sloan Fellowship from the Art Students League. The next year he traveled to Europe under a Edward G. MacDowell Traveling Fellowship where he practices in Stuttgard, Germany with Willy Baumeister. He also exhibited at Gallerie Huit in Paris. In 1954 Yamamoto was invited to a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. There he worked with Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko developing a unique abstract expressionist style. Later in his life he devoted himself to hard-edge painting.
Yamamoto had an extensive exhibition career including the Stable Gallery, Art Students League, Krasner Gallery, Westerly Gallery and Riverside Museum in New York; the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, Guild Hall in Easthampton, Miami Museum of Modern Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the University of Minnesota, Wellfleet Art Studio, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Parrish Art Museum in Southampton along with many others.
Biography courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL