Featured Acquisition: Leon Berkowitz, “Black Light” (1966)
| “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.” Leon Berkowitz |
| Leon Berkowitz (1911 – 1987) Black Light (1966) Oil on canvas 69.75 x 75.75 inches 70.5 x 76.5 inches framed Provenance: Estate of Leon Berkowitz Gary Snyder Fine Arts, New York, NY Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, NM Exhibition history: The American Federation of Arts, New York, NY Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, DC The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., “30th Biennal Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting,” February 24 – April 9, 1967, Cat. No. 113 Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, “The Cathedral Paintings,” August 5 – September 6, 2022 |
| 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. 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. “That whole notion of that I orchestrate the light within a painting so that it changes with the change of light of the day, is the idea of the continuousness of space and light and form –it’s a time involvement. And it doesn’t exist in any of the so-called color school people,” Berkowitz said. “ I want to make my painting as close to the condition of life that I can. And so I deal not with any kind of fixed aesthetic. I’m constantly looking for the principles by which nature makes its form. And Nature makes form to exist in time, and the form is always changing, it isn’t a fixed — there is no fixed reality. “ 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.Returning permanently to Washington in 1964, he joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art. |
| 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 further developed his vision of marrying form and structure with color and light. As light penetrates through up to 40 layers of thinly applied layers of an oil paint and turpentine mix, crystalline structures emerge. 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.; and the Golda Meir Collection, Jerusalem, among others. |
