
Under Glass: Master Works on Paper
June 2016 - June 2016
An exhibition of works on paper by some of the gallery’s most distinguished artists, including Joan Miró, Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Diego Rivera, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Herbert Bayer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others.
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(1910 - 1962)

Numerous small graphics, sketches and oils and the mural series Hot Jazz (Norfolk, VA, Chrysler Mus.), painted for a New York bar in 1940, reveal an interest in translating animated subjects into quick, rudimentary strokes. Franz Kline admired and found inspiration in a wide range of artists notable for their fluency in handling paint, including Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Sargent and Whistler.
By contrast, an inclination to compose in terms of simplified areas was derived from academic training and perhaps also reflected Kline’s memories of his native Pennsylvania’s coal-mining region, with its stark scenery, locomotives and similar massive mechanical shapes to which the titles of his later abstract images sometimes referred. Nijinsky as Petrouchka and similar canvases marked the climax of this representational phase with their combination of vigorous brushwork and an angular substructure. But against the context of contemporary New York painting a move towards abstraction was inevitable.
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(1903 - 2001)

Vicente was also an art educator with positions at Black Mountain College, University of California at Berkeley, New York University, Yale University, Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles.
He had his first one-man show at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1928, and from that time entered many exhibitions in Spain including Barcelona as well as Madrid where his paintings are in the Reina Sofia Museum. In 1991 Vicente was honored by King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain with the Gold Medal for Fine Arts.
Of his painting Esteban Vicente said: ...If I have to say something about the subject of my painting, I might say that it is an interior landscape. This image becomes the subject. It is always the same idea, the same image---from an accumulation of experience. I don't know if one can actually identify this image. When I say 'landscape', I mean a structure. The structure of the painting is landscape---but not the color. That's why I say they are 'inter landscapes'. " (Herskovic 346)
(1895 - 1976)

Bisttram founded the Taos School of Art as well as the first commercial gallery in Taos. Together with Raymond Johnson and others, Bisttram started the Transcendental Painting Group in Santa Fe in 1938. He was very active in fostering the growth of the arts in New Mexico up until his death at 81.
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(1880 - 1966)

As a teacher he brought to America direct knowledge of the work of a celebrated group of European modernists (prior to World War I he had lived and studied in Paris) and developed his own philosophy of art, which he expressed in essays which are among the most engaging discussions of painting in the twentieth century, including "The Color Problem in Pure Painting—Its Creative Origin."
Hofmann taught art for over four decades; his impressive list of students includes Helen Frankenthaler, Red Grooms, Alfred Jensen, Wolf Kahn, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson and Frank Stella. As an artist Hofmann tirelessly explored pictorial structure, spatial tensions and color relationships. In his earliest portraits done just years into the twentieth century, his interior scenes of the 1940s and his signature canvases of the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Hofmann brought to his paintings what art historian Karen Wilkin has described as a "range from loose accumulations of brushy strokes…to crisply tailored arrangements of rectangles…but that somehow seems less significant than their uniform intensity, their common pounding energy and their consistent physicality."
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(1922 - 1990)

(1921 - 1999)
Norman Bluhm was born in Chicago in 1921, and initially studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe. He studied briefly in Florence before moving to Paris in 1947 to continue studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After serving in World War II, Bluhm lived in Paris and developed an interest in figurative painting. In the 1960s, Bluhm was exploring relationships between swirling, loosely applied forms and unexpected arrangements of color in abstract painting. He used large brushes, soaked with vibrantly hued paint, and treated his work surface with enthusiasm and energy. This method produced works that were orgiastic in their dramatic intensity—bold, organically applied pigment insouciant in its application and outlook.Download Full Biography
(1899 - 1988)
Acclaimed for her development of a unique sculptural vocabulary and process, Louise Nevelson remained committed to innovation, experimentation, and her own personal artistic style for over five decades. Working within tradition of assemblage, she crafted abstract three-dimensional boxes, walls, totems and environments, comprised mostly of assembled found materials. The artist discovered her raw materials while walking the streets of New York, drawing cast-off debris from curbsides, dumps, and demolition sites. The found objects incorporated in her sculptures range from architectural remnants such as chair legs and balusters to scrap construction pieces revealing the ravages of tools and time.