Displaying items by tag: arshile gorky

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “Elaine de Kooning Portrayed,” a show that will include portraits of the artist both by her hand and those of others beginning next Thursday.

Through her own work as an artist and writer and her long association with her husband, Willem de Kooning, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Ms. de Kooning enjoyed many artistic friendships. The evidence can be seen in the show’s various images of her by artists such as Alex Katz, Robert De Niro Sr., Hedda Sterne, Fairfield Porter, and Arshile Gorky.

A rare early portrait by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668), a groundbreaking work by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), and a remarkable photograph of Alice and Lorina Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, are among works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Three rare illustrated books and a portfolio, all highlighting aspects of the New World, were donated by Harry W. Havemeyer in memory of his father, Horace Havemeyer. Harry W. Havemeyer also pledged an extraordinary collection of 117 early American views and historical prints assembled by him and his father, in whose memory the pledge was made.

Twenty-seven early Mark Rothko (1903-1970) works are currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio as part of the exhibition Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade, 1940-1950. The formative paintings are on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which boasts a strong Rothko collection of nearly 300 works.

Rothko’s works from the early 1940s are often overlooked and were even omitted from a Rothko retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. The exclusion set the tone for how people interpret Rothko’s oeuvre, often deeming his earlier works as less significant than his later works. Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade aims to dispel that notion.

The paintings on view, many of which are on paper, chart Rothko’s artistic evolution from vaguely figurative to purely abstract. Known for his layered canvases featuring often-rectangular blocks of color, Rothko explored various influences before developing his well-known signature style. The Decisive Decade illustrates Rothko’s early experimentation with shape, space and color and includes works by Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Robert Motherwell (1915-1951), and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) that share similar visual and conceptual characteristics with Rothko’s paintings.    

Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade will be on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through May 26, 2013.

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

When was the last time an expert from a top auction house dispensed with longtime allegiances and joined forces with someone from the enemy camp? In the fiercely competitive world of Sotheby’s and Christie’s, such an occurrence is rarer than a prized Vermeer.

But for months now there have been rumors that a new powerhouse partnership was in the works, one that would replace Giraud, Pissarro, Ségalot, the superprivate superdealer that pulled off so many big transactions and whose business began winding down soon after Franck Giraud, one of its partners, announced that he was leaving to “explore options inside the art world and out.”

The players making up this new venture, however, had been something of a guessing game.