Christopher Barrow Art

Acrylic on masonite. This is a pivotal work in deep and radiant cobalt blue from 1950. It dipicts calligraphic and hieroglyph structures over a grid and pyramidal base by the first generation abstract expressionist. Provenance: Skinner: November 13, 1992 [Lot 00219}, The entry in the Skinner catalog indicates that the painting came directly from the artist to the family of the consignor to Skinner. Kaminsky Auctions. There is an unbroken paper trail that traces the ownership of the painting from the current owner, through two auction houses to the artist. Perfect unbroken provenance. Pousette-Dart was among the most inventive of the Abstract Expressionist generation, His uncanny talent was to expand the nature of abstraction and still make each mark each element very much his own; a reflection of what he called   "the concealed power of the spirit," he said, “not of the brute physical form."   His was not aiming for a singular, realized aesthetic formula but to expand the possibilities of painting; the transcendental in painting. Typical of such invention and exploration is this  painting  Untitled 1950 when the artist was only 34 years old and represented by one of the champions of the new American painting, Betty Parsons.  
A banner year for Pousette-Dart, the Museum of Modern Art acquired their first painting by the Minnesota born artist.  He worked on easel size works such as this painting an oil on masonite. At the same time Pousette-Dart was also working on larger scale works such as Path of the Hero, running over ten feet in length now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Both contain fields of color articulated by a highly sophisticated white hieroglyphic vocabulary. Rather than demonstrate an expressionist sensibility, Pousette-Dart harnesses his more cerebral ideas transforming thick areas of paint into a more refined composition of geometric forms akin to the pattern and forms of say a stained glass window. In a way he is looking back at Fugue, 1940 a black and white composition which makes use of a similar format of painting albeit smaller. Color and form are minimal, but what Pousette-Dart has maximized is the rhythmic and syncopated character of painting casting his ideas into purely symbolic terms that one might link to the pictograms of Adolph Gottlieb. Nonetheless, nature is always at the core of Pousette-Dart’s thinking and dreaming. Here he has transformed the local Ramapo Mountains—where he will eventually move with his family to live and work— into a complex series of articulated fragments linked by style, scale and color.  The painting’s imagery built on two large triangles and reduced to just two colors, cobalt blue and white all outlined in black.  Pousette-Dart symbols stacked in horizontal and vertical rows:  blue is ground, white is language, symbolic of light, consciousness and awareness . The painting maintains a mystical character images compounded that formulate a secret code and linked to the series of white paintings Pousette-Dart authored in the first half of the 1950s. Get up close to the picture and you discover images within images a kind of picture puzzle...

Acrylic on canvas. Signed, titled, and dated on verso. 86 x 74 in. 87.25 x 75.25 in. (framed) Please note: Our framing studio could not accommodate the scale of this work, so it is being sold as-acquired. The canvas is housed in an original “studio strip” frame installed by the artist. Please see condition notes below for additional details and an assessment of condition. Provenance Steve Chase Design, Palm Springs, CA Ronnie Landfield was born in the Bronx, NY on January 9, 1947 - the same day as his older brother. As a teenager, he was encouraged to pursue a career as an artist, subsequently creating his first real paintings around the age of 14. He was particularly influenced by a Life magazine article from 1961 on the Abstract Expressionists, most notably: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. After stints at the Art Students League, the Kansas City Art Institute, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of California at Berkeley, Landfield’s professional career as a painter began in New York in 1965. The following year, after completing a major series of hard-edge border paintings, success as a painter began to materialize. The famous architect and collector Philip Johnson and the collector Robert Scull each acquired large paintings works, as did the Sheldon Memorial Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 1967, Landfield was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual at the end of the year. His work attracted considerable attention, and he was invited to participate in important group exhibitions at the Bykert, Bianchini, and Park Place Galleries in New York. Landfield joined the David Whitney...

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This work is offered by CLAMP in New York City.