Inspiration & Exploration by Anita Shapolsky Gallery

INSPIRATION & EXPLORATION Anita Shapolsky Gallery & A.S. Art Foundation

INSPIRATION & EXPLORATION APRIL 23 - AUGUST 16, 2019 Anita Shapolsky Gallery is pleased to announce Inspiration & Exploration, a group show featuring paintings, paper works, and sculpture from some of the greatest abstract artists of the 20th century. Inspiration & Exploration examines how these artists chose to define themselves and their world in a turbulent century, marked by two world wars, rapid technological and economic change, radical social movements, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Releasing themselves from the binds of traditional painting technique, compositional rules, and figurative subject matter, abstract artists were free to investigate new media, concepts, and visual languages. This exhibition, along with the accompanying catalog, trace each artist’s sources of inspiration and the various ways they all explored their personal style and medium.

ALCOPLEY

MARIO BENCOMO

FRED MITCHELL

JAMES BROOKS

LOUISE NEVELSON

CHRISTO

IRVING PETLIN

NORMAN CARTON NASSOS DAPHNIS

BETTY PARSONS ANNE RYAN

SONIA GECHTOFF

WILLIAM SAROYAN

STANLEY HAYTER

YVONNE THOMAS

TONY HARRISON

BUFFIE JOHNSON

cover: Betty Parsons, Looking Out, 1955 oil on canvas, 50” x 40”

ALBERT KOTIN

NANCY STEINSON

Anita Shapolsky Gallery & A.S. Art Foundation

ALCOPLEY (1910 - 1992) Alfred Lewin Copley, working under the pseudonym “L. Alcopley”, was one of the first members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. Alcopley helped to found The Club in 1949, an intellectual meeting place for artists in the New York School. Although born in Dresden, Germany, he worked in Paris, London, and New York. Before his artistic career, however, Alcopley worked as a scientist. Most notably, he established the field of hemorheology - the study of blood flow. His interest in this field may have influenced his use of drip painting and free-flowing brushstrokes, evident in Untitled, 1953. On May 21, 1951, Alcopley participated in the historical exhibition, “Ninth Street Show”, which was the first time the New York School artists, many of which were second-generation Abstract Expressionists, showed their work together in a commerical gallery space. “Ninth Street Show” was a major launching point, not only for Alcopley, but for his now-famous contemporaries like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Alcopley’s works are included in several renown museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Alcopley, Untitled, 1953 oil on paper, 36.5” x 14.75”

MARIO BENCOMO

JAMES BROOKS

(1953 - present)

(1906 - 1992)

Mario Bencomo was born in Cuba, but was sent alone to live in Spain as a child. At the age of 14, he left Europe for New York City in 1968. He never broke away from his original cultural links to Cuba or Spain, often returning to Europe for extended stays, adding his American education to his multicultural experience and work.

James Brooks, a large-scale painter and Works Progress Administration (WPA) muralist, served in World War II like many other artists seduced by the G.I. Bill. An early Abstract Expressionist and friend of Jackson Pollock, he experimented with Automatism and free brushwork after discarding the Social Realism of his early career (during which he created one of his most famous works including a mural at LaGuardia Airport).

In 1996 he returned to Cuba for the first time in almost three decades and since then Bencomo visits Cuba periodically. He is based in Miami. His work relates to various themes: the sensual ambiguity of form found in nature, mythology, mystical ecstasy, history and personal experience. Bencomo often blurs the line between the spiritual and the sensual. A voracious reader, his work is also inspired by poetry. Mario Bencomo continues to be inspired by natural forms that appear throughout human history, like the almond, which has come to symbolize fertility, the tear drop, and was frequently used by the ancient Egyptians. Bencomo’s work is included in numerous international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Denver Art Museum, and the National Museum of Fine Arts in Cuba.

Mario Bencomo, Goddess Maze II, n.d. acrylic on canvas, 24” x 18” 6

Brooks was a pioneer in the use of staining, dilution, and accidental deterioration of canvases to create uncontrolled abstraction; he often applied his mixtures of commercial products and paints directly from the tube to create thick, deep surfaces, before adding in fluid lines and abstract shapes. He explored the very process of painting, often working from both the front and back of the canvas, allowing paint to seep through: a metaphor for life’s mistakes and mishaps. Brooks’ later works moved towards a purer exploration of color and form. Brooks is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Booklyn Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, and the Smithsonian, among many others.

James Brooks, A, 1954 oil on canvas, 17” x 23” 7

NORMAN CARTON (1908 - 1980) Norman Carton, a Ukranian-American from Pennsylvania, played both roles of artist and gallerist. Working in both Paris, France and New York, Carton showed at numerous galleries and went on to open the Dewey Gallery in New York City in 1962. Carton was also a muralist for the WPA in the 1940s. After spending much time in Paris, the fashion capital of the world, Carton unsurprisingly took much inspiration from fashion. Carton was moved to open a design and production company that specialized in hand-made fabric for high-end fashion houses like Lord & Taylor. His ample use of thickly applied oil paint not only aligned with the painterly techniques of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, but it is also indicative of his interest in textiles and their unique textures. Carton was awarded numerous prizes and awards, exhibited in multiple group shows, had over 20 one-man shows, and was part of the prestigious Martha Jackson group. His works are included in art institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, and the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

Norman Carton, Blue Grotto, 1957 oil on canvas, 72” x 50”

CHRISTO (1935 - present) Christo, or Christo Javacheff, is a Bulgarian-born artist who, along with his partner and wife Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon, are known for their controversial monumental environmental sculptures. Christo and Jeanne-Claud moved to New York City in 1964. Their work is often grouped with the Italian art movement of Arte Povera, which critiqued art historical institutions for their inherent elitism, classism, and traditionalism through art that utilized everyday, ubiquitous materials. Christo’s sketches illuminate his playful process of wrapping sculptures and other architectural elements with fabric, simultaneously covering and drawing attention to these elements. He and his wife also used found materials - including plastic bottles, cans, and other items usually considered “trash” - in their work, aligning themselves with other Environmental and Land artists who engaged in environmental activism through art. While many of Christo and Jeanne-Claud’s works are temporary in nature, they have exhibited their work and created projects around the world at iconic art historical sites and institutions.

Christo, Wrapped Statues, 1988 collage with silkscreen, 35.5” x 43” 10

NASSOS DAPHNIS (1914 - 2010) Born in Greece, Nassos Daphnis moved to New York City in 1930, where he found employment in his uncle’s flower shop. Daphnis had been drawing and carving since childhood. In New York, he continued drawing during odd hours until a chance meeting with another florist’s assistant, Michael Lekakis, changed his life. Lekakis offered him the use of his studio and a model for a few days each week. Eventually, Daphnis purchased paints and set up a studio of his own. His early paintings were based on memories of Greece. Naive in style and characterized by a strong feeling for color and form, a work was eventually sold to William Gratwick. Daphnis would continue working in botany throughout his life. The artist liked to say that he had two real careers, painting and horticulture. After returning from World War II, deeply affected by Europe’s devastation, Daphnis, began to paint surreal landscapes, laying on images of ruin with a palette knife. In time, his work evolved into biomorphic shapes representing the natural world. A trip to Greece in 1950 inspired Daphnis to create flat, abstract, geometric paintings after he was inspired by the harsh, bright light of the Mediterranean. Upon returning to New York, Daphnis exhibited with Leo Castelli Gallery for over thirty years and solidified his place within the New York School. Daphnis is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the MoMA, the Whitney, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and many more.

Nassos Daphnis, A Happy Journey, 1948 watercolor on paper, 22” x 14.5”

SONIA GECHTOFF (1926 - 2018) Sonia Gechtoff was considered one of the most influential female Abstract Expressionists. Her father was a painter and introduced her to socialist realism at a young age. She was greatly inspired by Clyfford Still, though she crafted a signature style for herself by using a loaded palette knife to create vibrant, gestural strokes at large scales. In 1957, she was given her first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. As a prime example of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism’s raw, unique influence, Gechtoff’s experimental approaches are exemplary of the collective coolness of the Bay Area. A focus on smooth, otherworldly strokes permeate her works, in direct contrast to the faster movements and more vibrant palette of the New York School. Inspired by poetry, particularly by her contemporaries in the Beat generation, Gechtoff and her peers viewed painting as the visual component of literature and emphasized this duality through allusions to distant figuration, swirling motifs, spiritual encounters, and visual representations of verbal expression in her paintings. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1989, 1994, and 1998, and received the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Gechtoff was one of the twelve women featured in the traveling Denver Art Museum exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by Gwen Chanzit.

Nassos Daphnis, Icarus, 1948 oil on masonite, 30” x 24”

Sonia Gechtoff, Japanese Garden, 1989 acrylic and graphite on paper, 13” x 13”

TONY HARRISON (1931 - 2012) Tony Harrison explored multiple forms of media and printmaking techniques throughout his career, including painting, sculpture, printing, etching, engraving, and even illuminated manuscripts. Though born and educated in England, Harrison was so inspired by the burgeoning art scene in New York that he decided to move there in 1965. He took a teaching position at Columbia University and taught their first printmaking workshop. Harrison took inspiration from the bold use of solid colors by New York School artists like Robert Motherwell. Harrison’s practice was transformative; he took natural materials like wood and carved it into painted, strict geometric forms to the point where it came to resemble plastic. His attention to line stemmed from his love of drawing and illustration.

Sonia Gechtoff, Goya’s Ghost, 1998 acrylic on canvas, 35” x 35”

Tony Harrison, #VIII, 1992 painted wood, 23” x 15” x 6”

STANLEY WILLIAM HAYTER (1901 - 1988) Hayter was born in Hackney, England to a family of artists. Though always interested in art, he began his adult life as a chemist and scientist. He went to Paris in 1926 to study at the Acadamie Julian. where he met the engraver Jospeh Hecht and began to merge his early training in chemistry with a newfound interest in printmaking. Hayter would spend most of his life in Paris where, in 1927, he founded an experimental workshop for the graphic arts, Atelier 17, that played a central role in the 20th century revival of the print as an independent art form. Through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Hayter began a series of experiments using engraving, soft-ground etching, gaffrauge, open-bite, scorper and other innovative, textural techniques, all loosely based on the Surrealist/Jungian concepts of subconscious image and automatic line. In 1940 Hayter moved to New York and re-founded Atelier 17 at the New School, moving to a studio on East 8 Street in 1945. The studio again became a melting pot for the artists who had come over from Europe, American artists and some young rebels. In New York the emphasis was on experimental color printing. As in Paris, the salability of the image was near the bottom of the list of expectations. Hayter returned to Paris in 1950 and re-established Atelier 17, attracting more international artists, many now coming from Asia. He continued to experiment with color printing, including the use of Flowmaster pens, incongruous and fluorescent colors and flowing, interwoven patterns. Hayter’s works can be found in museums around the world, including, but certainly not limited to: the Met, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Modern Art, Columbia Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Tate Modern.

Stanley Hayter, Pavane, 1935 wooden collage on wood, 57” x 38”

BUFFIE JOHNSON (1912 - 2006) Buffie Johnson had the great fortune of several distinct artistic trajectories as a realist, abstract, and symbolic painter. Johnson began her artistic career in the late 1930s, when she traveled to Paris and studied with Francis Picabia. Upon her return to New York, Johnson exhibited in Peggy Guggenheim’s historic show “Art of This Century” in 1943, the first commercial exhibition devoted to the work of 31 women artists. A self-professed feminist, Johnson was also a published author of Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals, which traces imagery of the Goddess across history and other cultures. Buffie Johnson shifted her style and medium over several decades to reflect her changing perspectives of the cyclical nature of life. Her early work was figurative, displaying a highly finished, almost photographic detail. In the post-war period, Johnson moved into an extremely energetic, organic, abstract mode. At this time, she showed in the Betty Parsons Gallery with some of the most pre-eminent Abstract Expressionists. By the 1950s, Johnson had graduated to large murals like the ones she completed for the Astor Theater in Times Square in 1959. Then began many years of working representationally with images of flowers and plants, after which she began a series of works called “Numberings”, returning to an Abstract Expressionist style that was almost transcendent in its sparseness. Johnson’s works can be found in the collections of top museums like the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian, and the Whitney, and at many others such as the Yale Art Gallery, the Walker Art Center, the Baltimor Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Buffie Johnson, Pentecost, 1958 oil on canvas, 63” x 44” 20

Buffie Johnson, Untitled, 1953 oil on canvas, 51” x 19.5”

Buffie Johnson, Wild Garden, 1950 oil on canvas, 41” x 18”

ALBERT KOTIN (1907 - 1980) Albert Kotin was a global artist and teacher who worked with prominent Abstract Expressionists. Kotin’s earlier work was clearly influenced by De Kooning and Pollock, but he ultimately developed his own signature style distinguished by colorful vortexes of textural brushstrokes. Kotin was born in Minsk, Russia. He studied at various acclaimed institutions: the Art Students’ League, Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, and the Hans Hoffman School. In the 1950s, Kotin was an integral part of the New York City 10th Street Group which included some of the foremost Abstract Expressionist artists of the day, such as Phillip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky, and Harold Rosenberg. His works have been exhibited in many shows and galleries in New York City, Mexico, Paris, Pennsylvania, Houston, and Illinois, amongst others.

Albert Kotin, Untitled, ca. 1950 oil on canvas, 66” x 78”

FRED MITCHELL (1923 - 2013) Fred Mitchell co-founded the Tanager Gallery in 1952 and participated in other artist-run communities in New York, like those on Coenties Slip, that were foundational to the success of many emerging second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Mitchell also founded the Coenties Slip School of Art, holding classes from his loft that further contributed to the co-operative nature of the downtown art scene. Mitchell was inspired by fellow artists he encountered at the Club and on Coenties Slip and artists he met while in Rome on a grant from Pepsi Cola. Michell developed a unique style that brought order to his explosive colors with careful, thin applications of oil paint. He was able to layer colorful forms in a way that added complexity to an otherwise flat surface. Mitchell gained enough recognition to be invited to show at the Stable Gallery’s Annual for two consecutive years, in the Young American Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1954, and in Nine Artists, Coenties Slip at the Whitney in 1974.

Fred Mitchell, Landscape Meridianale, 1955 oil on canvas, 36” x 34” 26

LOUISE NEVELSON

BETTY PARSONS

(1899 - 1988)

(1900 - 1982)

Louise Nevelson established her presence in an otherwise male-dominated practice of monumental sculptural installations. While widely acclaimed for her signature mono-chromatic painted wood pieces, Nevelson also created collages using paper and other found materials.

Betty Parsons opened her renown gallery in 1946 and was integral in establishing Pollock and other famed Abstract Expressionists. Inspired by her exposure to these artists, Parsons began exploring these avant-garde influences in her own painting, but she was too ethical and humble to show her work at her own gallery.

Nevelson was born Kiev, Russia. Her family moved to the United States in 1905, and in 1920 she moved to New York City and began studying at the Art Students League in 1929. Using old pieces of wood, found objects, she constructed huge walls, enclosed box arrangements of complex and rhythmic abstract shapes. Her first one-woman show was at the Karl Nierendorf Gallery in New York in 1941. She had solo exhibitions at the Norlyst and Nierendorf Galleries from 1943 to 1944. Her sculptures are included in many of the world’s most esteemed museums.

She recorded her explorations of nature with radiant light in her 1950s paintings. In the 60s, Parsons changed her medium to acrylic (as did many artists at the time), resulting in a flatter surface of more intense, brilliant color. She differed from her male contemporaries in her use of titles instead of numbering her work - a result of her love of poetry and wordplay. Later on that decade, Parsons started working on the found wooden constructions at her home on the beach of Long Island. Many critics have considered her sculpture to be her best work, but Parsons more than proved she could paint at the same level as her male contemporaries.

In later years she studied printmaking and experimented with marble and terracotta. Her fame came about from her show Ancient Games and Ancient Places at Grand Central Moderns and she is now considered one of the most important American sculptors.

Louise Nevelson, Untitled, 1959 painted wood, 17.5” x 14.5” x 11.5”

Betty Parsons, Silver Grey, 1974 acrylic on canvas, 45” x 43”

IRVING PETLIN

ANNE RYAN

(1934 - 2018)

(1889 - 1954)

Irving Petlin attempted to visually catalog society - both the good and the ugly - using a style that was neither abstract nor figurative. Petlin’s passion for social justice most likely developed from his childhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants who fled Poland before the horrors of World War II, but many of Petlin’s Polish family were killed in concentration camps. As a result, many of Petlin’s works touch on themes of war, protest, injustice, violence, and revolt.

Anne Ryan was a self-taught artist and writer who was greatly inspired by other creatives living and working in New York’s Greenwich Village. After publishing her first novel in 1926, Ryan spent time travelling and met many artists abroad and in the States, like Hons Hofmann, who would encourage her to transition from writing to painting.

Petlin was recognized for his masterful work with oil pastel. Using vibrant colors, Petlin harnessed the medium’s soft, blurred quality in direct contrast with his harsh, politically charged subject matter. He also took inspiration from music and literature and often made pastel drawings based on stories and classical compositions from composers like Bach. Born in Chicago, educated at Yale, based in Los Angeles and Paris, and extensively traveled, Petlin was a man of the world. He explored many styles, from Surrealism to Symbolism, but his examination of the creative and destructive potential of humanity was a constant thread in his oeuvre.

Irving Petlin, The High Plants (from the Calcuim Garden), 1969 oil on canvas, 34” x 34”

Unlike her male contemporaries exploring large-scale action-paintings that sought to express their inner psychologies, Ryan became mystified by the medium of collage. In 1948, at the age of 58, Ryan furiously created hundreds of collages and prints using paper, fabric, and other found materials - including sugar cube wrappers from restaurants she frequented. Using techniques she taught herself and learned in Stanley Hayter’s printmaking studio, Atelier 17, Ryan produced an impressively diverse oeuvre that diverged from the thenpopular path of Abstract Expressionism.

Anne Ryan, The Moon is a Flower III, 1940s paper print, 23” x 17”

WILLIAM SAROYAN

NANCY STEINSON

(1908 - 1981)

Though rarely recognized for it, William Saroyan completed numerous gestural paintings and watercolors throughout his life that vacillated between playful and serious, minimal and complex, ordered and chaotic.

With a background in political science and a childhood spent growing up in the South, Nancy Steinson has a unique approach to sculpture. She studied under Peter Agostini in New York and was heavily influenced by Brancusi.

Born in Fresno, California to Armenian immigrant parents, Saroyan would go on to become one of the top writers of the mid-twentieth century, producing screenplays, novels, and short stories. He was also a visual artist of drawings and watercolors, but he never sold nor exhibited his works and never really identified as an “artist”. His abstract work was influenced by Chinese brush drawing, Jackson Pollock, and the calligraphic work of Mark Tobey. He was criticized for sentimentality — freedom, brotherly love, and universal benevolence were for him basic values - but his idealism was considered out of step with the times.

Steinson seeks to move beyond the limiting purity of Minimalism by incorporating organic, flowing, curving lines in her forms using primarily bronze and welded steel. These lines suggest an energy moving through her works, ultimately pushing beyond the physical boundaries of her sculptures into the space surrounding them.

William Saroyan, #3 Feb 22 1963 SF, 1963 watercolor on paper, 18” x 24”

Nancy Steinson, Sagitta, 1997 polished bronze, 5” x 31” x 10”

Steinson continues to exhibit in galleries around New York and has participated in numerous national and international group and solo shows.

YVONNE THOMAS (1913 - 2009) Yvonne Thomas was born in Nice, France and moved to America to study at Cooper Union, the Art Student’s League, and the Subject of the Artist school. She studied alongside renowned abstract painters such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell and became close friends with Willem De Kooning and Marcel Duchamp during her time in France. Like the other early Abstract Expressionists, Thomas was a follower of Automatism, the idea that an artist can express their innermost thoughts and feelings through free, uninhibited, action-painting. Yvonne Thomas explored the symbolic potential in color through both gestural and structured paintings, simultaneously embracing and rejecting the grid. Her paintings combine aspects of both color field painting and gestural abstraction. She was a member of the Artist’s Club, exhibited in the famed “Ninth Street Show” in 1951 along with Alcopley, and was included in numerous shows at the Sable, Tanager, and Betty Parsons galleries. Recently, her work was featured in the historic Denver Art Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism.

Yvonne Thomas, Map Notes, 1965 oil on canvas, 60” x 60” 34

Copyright © 2019 by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery & A. S. Art Foundation Catalog by Eve Erickson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechnical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests and ordering information, contact: info@anitashapolskygallery.com or visit our website: www.anitashapolskygallery.com or call: (212) 452-1094

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