Works of the 1960s and 1970s

Works of the 1960s and 1970s

Works of the 1960s and 1970s Cheim & Read Frieze Masters 2012

Cheim & Read was founded in 1996 by co-owners John Cheim and Howard Read. The gallery focuses primarily on the representation of an international group of leading contemporary artists, whose diverse practices include painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video. Each artist represented by Cheim & Read has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the world.

The gallery’s program is best characterized by its adherence to a rigorous curatorial model and its strength in presenting critical monographic exhibitions for the work of its artists. Cheim & Read is also known for organizing historically significant exhibitions including: “Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade,” “Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works” and “The New Landscape/The New Still Life,” an in-depth examination of Chaim Soutine’s influence on modern art.

Since its founding, Cheim & Read has also specialized in the resale of select works of art from the 20th century by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. Members of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), the gallery subscribes to the highest standard of connoisseurship, scholarship and ethical practice, and offers an effective and confidential alternative for the transfer of important works of art from and on behalf of private individuals and institutions.

Lynda Benglis

Born 1941

Lynda Benglis was first recognized in the late sixties with her poured latex and foam works. Benglis’s work created a perfectly timed retort to the male dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen.

Lynda Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe and Ahmedabad, India.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s Lynda Benglis, 1970

work is in extensive public collections including: Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York;

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Most recently Benglis was the subject of an international retrospective that traveled to: The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times on February 17, 2011 of Benglis’s retrospective, “Whether you have been watching Ms. Benglis’s varied career for decades or know her primarily from the latex pieces and her star turn in Artforum, this exhibition pulls together and elaborates her remarkable career in a thrilling way. It proves her work to be at once all over the place and very much of a piece, as well as consistently, irrepressibly ahead of its time. This would seem to be every renegade artist’s dream.”

Lynda Benglis Untitled 1970 pigmented polyurethane foam 3 1/2 x 36 x 54 in 8.9 x 91.4 x 137.2 cm

Lynda Benglis Cocoon 1971 purified pigmented beeswax and damar resin on wood and masonite 36 x 5 in 91.4 x 12.7 cm

Lynda Benglis Come 1969-74 cast bronze 14 x 32 x 48 in 35.6 x 81.3 x 121.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois

1911—2010

Internationally renowned artist Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. Although she lived in New York from 1938 until her death in 2010, much of her inspiration was derived from her early childhood in France. The family’s prosperous business was the restoration and resale of seventeenth and eighteenth-century tapestries. She often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life; her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid and her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities.

Using the body as a primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of the human condition. From poetic drawings to room-size installations, she was able to give her fears a physical form in order to exorcise them.

Louise Bourgeois, circa 1965 Courtesy The Easton Foundation

Memories, love and abandonment are the core of her complex body of work.

Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983.

Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington D.C.; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Louise Bourgeois's work appears in the most important museum collections worldwide and has been the subject of several major traveling retrospectives organized by the Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunstverein, Frankfurt.

Louise Bourgeois Clutching 1962 bronze, black patina 12 x 13 x 12 in 30.5 x 33 x 30.5 cm © Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, NY

Louise Bourgeois Cumuls 1972 watercolor on paper 26 x 35 in 66 x 88.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois Avenza Revisited 1968-69 bronze with silver nitrate and polished patina 17 x 41 x 35 in 43.2 x 104.1 x 88.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois Unconscious Landscape 1967-68 bronze, black and polished patina 12 x 22 x 24 in 30.5 x 55.9 x 61 cm

Hans Hartung

1904 – 1989

Though German-born, Hans Hartung (1904 – 1989) is most often identified by his artistic activity in Paris and his involvement in the French Art Informel or Tachist movements. Though his post-war paintings resembled gestural abstractions driven by an emotional, intuitive source, they were surprisingly premeditated, carefully copied from sometimes much earlier, spontaneous drawings and enlarged to fit the canvas. Hartung’s exacting realization of his paintings provides evidence of the great control, technical aptitude and thoughtfulness with which he approached his work. His exploration of the varieties of gesture and mark within self-imposed boundaries was to be an everchanging but life-long focus.

Hans Hartung at the Metropolitan Museum, 1975

The two paintings presented for Frieze Masters, both dating 1971, exemplify Hartung’s experimental approach. In the 1970s, Hartung

intentionally aimed to distance the artist’s gesture from the tool’s effect on the medium, resulting in concise and elegant compositions. He avidly sought out a variety of tools, from self-modified brushes and paint rollers to brooms and airbrushes. In T1971-R12 and T1971-R24, the characteristic clarity of his colors—primarily saturated blues and yellows—are buoyed by a flat black ground, which both intensifies hue and reveals process. In one, a brayer skids across the surface, resulting in calligraphic, almost symbolic forms. In the other, paint is troweled and raked, leaving paths of black through densely packed fields of color. Innovative and dramatic, they are witness to Hartung’s continuous and fearless experimentation with mark-making. In relation to his artistic practice of the 1970s, Hartung stated: “Since 1970, I have had the feeling of a renewal. As if I had been granted new energy, a new youth. And, above all, the need to make great paintings.”

Hans Hartung received numerous honors including; The Prix Guggenheim; The International Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale; France’s International Order of Arts and Letters (Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres); Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris and Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur by President Mitterrand. Hartung’s work has been exhibited worldwide and was presented in 2005 at the Museum of Fine Art, Beijing and traveled to the National Museum, Nanjing.

Hans Hartung T1971-R12 1971 acrylic on canvas 44 7/8 x 57 1/2 in 114 x 146 cm

Hans Hartung T1971-R24 1971 acrylic on canvas 60 5/8 x 98 3/8 in 154 x 250 cm

Jannis Kounellis

Born 1936

Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece in 1936. He moved to Rome in 1956, where he became an active participant in the Arte Povera movement in the 1960s. In 1969, he famously created Untitled for Galleria L’Attico in Rome by positioning twelve live horses in a rectangular exhibition space; the work deconstructed set ideas of artistic practice and referenced the horse’s long history of cultural and artistic representation. Kounellis strives to remove art from its hierarchical structure and reposition it in co-existence with the everyday. His use of substances like iron, cotton, coal, burlap, coffee, and gold, as well as animate objects like birds, animals and fire, produces multi-layered work that references cultural and political conditions (commerce, agriculture, trade, labor) while maintaining Jannis Kounellis, Performance at the Modern Art Agency, Naples, 1973

poetic and often profound dichotomies between his chosen materials.

Kounellis’s work can be defined by metamorphosis: his careful placement of objects transforms them from the ordinary to the artistically resonant. His exhibition spaces often reference a stage, within which his installations are a sort of theater. Contrasting materials become actively engaged characters; the apparent tensions between them (rigid/malleable, animate/unmoving, organic/inorganic) provide a sense of spontaneity, drama and implied narrative. In recent works, Kounellis’s use of personal artifacts (overcoats, shoes, beds) and their associations with transience suggest the props of a refugee.

Ideas of transition, exile, and regeneration underscore a major theme of his work: the exploratory journey and often nomadic search for self-identity. Kounellis’s works are distinguished not only by an attempt to unify art and life, but, more importantly, by the dialogue that occurs between the two.

Kounellis lives and works in Rome. He had his first solo show in New York in 1972. Recently, he has had exhibitions at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; the MADRE Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy; and the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy, among others. Kounellis’s work is represented in several American and international collections.

Jannis Kounellis Untitled 1967 wood panel painted black with hanging metal bird cage 78 3/4 x 63 in 200 x 160 cm

Man Ray

1890 – 1976

American artist Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitsky) was born in Philadelphia in 1890. His family later moved to New York and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Man Ray studied drawing under Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Ferrer Center in 1912, and was profoundly influenced by the 1913 Armory Show, a renowned avant-garde exhibition which introduced modern art to America. A frequent visitor to Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, Man Ray discovered burgeoning movements in contemporary European art, as well as early American modernism and the photographic work of Stieglitz and his circle. He began making abstract paintings and collages, and in 1915 had his first solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery, New York.

Man Ray, Paris circa 1950s

Soon after he began experimenting in photography, a medium for which he became best known.

Innovative and provocative, Man Ray straddled both the Dada and Surrealist movements and was an important and influential contributor to each. With lifelong friend Marcel Duchamp and patron Katherine Dreier, Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in 1920. In 1921, the same year Man Ray moved to Paris, he and Duchamp produced “New York Dada,” a unique publication which chronicled the movement. In Paris he began to explore photography further, and in 1922 began creating “rayographs,” camera-less photographs similar to photograms, in which everyday objects were transformed into enigmatic imagery. In 1925, he was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, along with Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.

Man Ray dismissed implied hierarchies between mediums and produced works in many different styles and media. The paintings presented at Freize Masters both date from 1963. Referred to as “Natural Paintings,” the works were created by squeezing tubes of paint directly on a plywood support. Another board was pressed on top and removed, resulting in compositions unmitigated by the artist, as if they had “made themselves.” Though Man Ray originally conceived of them as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and its prevailing focus on gesture, the works’ attention to material and process anticipate artistic concerns of the coming 70s: for example, as seen in the poured work of Lynda Benglis or the tool-driven investigations of Hans Hartung.

In 1940, Man Ray left for Los Angeles in order to avoid the German occupation of Paris during World War II. In 1951, after over a decade of painting and making objects in Hollywood and New York, he returned to Paris and remained there until his death in 1976. Throughout his life, Man Ray continued to experiment, rejecting rigid definitions of art and expanding his own artistic practice.

Man Ray Othello II (Natural Painting) 1963 acrylic on plywood 17 1/8 x 13 1/4 in 43.9 x 34 cm

Man Ray Decembre Ou le Clown (Natural Painting) 1963 acrylic on plywood 17.3 x 14.2 in 43.9 x 36.1 cm

Joan Mitchell 1925—1992 Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell established herself as a formidable talent in postwar New York’s avant-garde scene. In 1951, her work was exhibited alongside that of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Hans Hoffman in the celebrated “Ninth Street Show,” which marked the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism within the development of modern art. Exemplifying the ideals of the New York School, Mitchell’s paintings wager all on the expressive potential of the painterly mark itself, freed from the constraints of traditional representation. Given the macho posturing for which the movement’s adherents have earned a reputation – almost all of them were men – Joan Mitchell’s prowess in this milieu is all the more remarkable.

Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1963

Mitchell was connected to her generation’s response to and redirection of gestural abstraction.

Sparked by elements and colors found in her surroundings—the circuitous line of the river, the specific blue hue of the sky—Mitchell’s works are charged with a concentrated reaction to her natural and emotional environment; they provide intimate evidence of a hand and mind in motion.

Critic John Yau has written, “It is her singular achievement to have stripped her process down to the simplest means…in order to make her work allude to something far larger than landscape, and that is the exigencies of life itself.”

Joan Mitchell has since been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, and examples of her work hang in nearly all major public collections of modern art including: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Osaka City Art Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Samsung Museum, Seoul and the Tate Gallery, London.

Joan Mitchell Untitled 1961 oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 20 3/4 in 72.4 x 52.7 cm © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Courtesy Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Joan Mitchell Le Chemin des Ecoliers 1960 oil on canvas 76 3/4 x 38 1/8 in 194.9 x 96.8 cm

Milton Resnick

1904 – 1989

Born in Bratslav, Ukraine in 1917, Resnick immigrated to the United States with his family in 1922. In 1933, he transferred from Pratt, where he studied commercial art, to the American Artists School in order to focus on painting; he graduated in 1937. A first generation New York School painter, Resnick maintained friendships with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. While his early work reflected the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, Resnick ultimately eclipsed more traditional notions of the genre. His transition from explicitly Abstract Expressionist modes to the dense and heavily-impastoed monochrome canvases of his later years resulted from an intensive exploration of paint’s materiality and the subsequent dissolution of

Milton Resnick, Circa 1967

form and “image.” Resnick’s allegiance to the physical properties of paint, its viscosity and “actuality,” was in turn predictive of younger painters like Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman and Frank Stella, and anticipated artistic movements concerned with process, materiality, and perception.

Resnick strived to distill abstraction to its essence, championing an “all-over” approach to the canvas and refusing prescribed “meaning.” Though seemingly impenetrable, his work achieves visceral duality. Often characterized by their massive size, the paintings intentionally remain within the viewer’s peripheral vision: they are meant to locate one in space and, more significantly, at a place.

Unyielding surfaces become reflective, almost luminous. The effect of time, or rather the aspiration to timelessness, is apparent: the paintings seem to hover in a constant state of “becoming.” For the patient viewer, Resnick’s work is transcendent. He stated: “Art is not a learning process. It is the very reverse of learning. It is the unhinging of your soul from your sight.”

Resnick died March 12, 2004. Roberta Smith, for his New York Times obituary, wrote: “Mr. Resnick might qualify as the last Abstract Expressionist painter.” Widely shown, his work is represented in many American and international collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Malmö Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, among many others. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York, and group shows at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisz and Fundacion Caja, Madrid, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, among others.

Milton Resnick Continent 1963 oil on paper mounted on linen 66 1/4 x 42 in 168.3 x 106.7 cm

Milton Resnick Fire B 1975 oil on canvas 90 1/4 x 80 in 229.2 x 203.2 cm

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Cover: Louise Bourgeois Untitled 1969 watercolor and charcoal on paper 25 3/4 x 39 in 65.4 x 99.1 cm

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