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William BaziotesUnique SIGNED Abstract Expressionist drawing major WPA artist, Estate issued COA1955
1955
About the Item
WILLIAM BAZIOTES
Untitled Abstract Expressionist Mid Century Modern ink drawing with Estate COA, ca. 1955
Ink Drawing on Paper
Signed lower right recto. Accompanied by letter of authenticity from Estate.
Unique
Measurements:
Framed:
14.5 inches by 17.5 inches. x .5 inches
Artwork
8.5 x 11 inches
This work is by the American painter William Baziotes. Baziotes graduated from the National Academy of Design in New York. His interest in the surrealism movement can be seen in the lyrical compositions that comprise a large portion of his work. Baziotes, along with David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, founded the Subjects of the Artist School. Baziotes was also one of the first New York artists to experiment with the surrealist technique, automatic drawing.
Framed 14.5 inches by 17.5 inches. This work was acquired from the famous Pennypacker auction of the Baziotes Estate, and is accompanied by a letter of authenticity and provenance from the artist's widow Ethel Baziotes.
William Baziotes Biography:
B. 1912, PITTSBURGH; D. 1963, NEW YORK
William Baziotes was born on June 11, 1912, in Pittsburgh, to parents of Greek origin. He grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he worked at the Case Glass company from 1931 to 1933, antiquing glass and running errands. At this time, he took evening sketch classes and met the poet Byron Vazakas, who became a lifelong friend. Vazakas introduced Baziotes to the work of Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets. In 1931, Baziotes saw the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and in 1933 he moved to that city to study painting. From 1933 to 1936, Baziotes attended the National Academy of Design.
In 1936, he exhibited for the first time in a group show at the Municipal Art Gallery, New York, and was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project as an art teacher at the Queens Museum of Art. Baziotes worked in the WPA's easel division from 1938 to 1941. He met the Surrealist émigrés who came to New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and by 1940 knew Jimmy Ernst, Matta (Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren), and Gordon Onslow-Ford. He began to experiment with Surrealist automatism at this time. In 1941, Matta introduced Baziotes to Robert Motherwell, with whom he formed a close friendship. André Masson invited Baziotes to participate with Motherwell, David Hare, and others in First Papers of Surrealism (1942) at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion, New York. In 1943, he took part in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery-museum Art of This Century, New York, where his first solo exhibition was held the following year. With Hare, Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, Baziotes founded the Subjects of the Artist school, New York, in 1948. Over the next decade, Baziotes held several teaching positions in New York: at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and New York University (1949–52); People's Art Center, MoMA (1950–52); and Hunter College (1952–62).
In his lifetime, Baziotes's work was included in numerous group exhibitions that helped establish his art alongside that of other abstract painters based in New York, including shows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1947); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1950); MoMA (1951, 1952); São Paulo Biennial (1953–54); Tate Gallery, London (1956); Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1959); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1960); and Guggenheim Museum (1962). Baziotes died in New York on June 6, 1963. A memorial exhibition was presented at the Guggenheim Museum in 1965.
-Courtesy Guggenheim Museum
WILLIAM BAZIOTES BIOGRAPHY
It is the mysterious that I love in my painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my picture to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt." (i)
Born in Pittsburgh, William Baziotes grew up in the Greek community of Reading, Pennsylvania. In 1931, he began working for the Case Glass Company—antiquing glass and running errands—while taking evening sketching classes, where he met poet Byron Vazakas, who soon became a close friend. Vazakas exposed him to French symbolist poetry and the work of Charles Baudelaire. That same year, Baziotes saw an exhibition of Henri Matisse’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1933, he moved to New York City and enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design, where he studied painting with Charles Curran, Ivan Olinsky, Gifford Beal, and Leon Kroll. In 1936, Baziotes left the Academy and participated in his first group exhibition, at the Municipal Art Gallery in New York. He found work with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an art teacher at the Queens Museum, and then joined the easel division of the WPA’s Federal Art Project 1938.
In the years leading up to World War II, New York had become a vital gathering center for European surrealist and modernist artists fleeing the rising tide of fascism. Their presence had a profound impact on many of the artists who encountered their work, and Baziotes was no exception. In the late 1930s, he moved away from figural, academic representation, towards increasingly abstract paintings of biomorphic forms. Since surrealism was an entire art ethos—addressing form, content, and just as importantly, an artist’s entire relationship to art—New York was crucial not just for Baziotes’s style but also his approach to creating images. In 1940, Baziotes met Chilean artist Roberto Matta, who in turn introduced him to Robert Motherwell, who became a close friend. In addition to these artists and the European surrealists in exile, Baziotes befriended Jimmy Ernst, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. In 1942, Baziotes, his wife (Ethel Copstein Baziotes), Pollock, Krasner, and Motherwell would often meet to play surrealist games and collaborate on poetry. These sessions helped Baziotes open his artwork up to spontaneity and automatism.
In the 1940s, Baziotes gained greater visibility. Marcel Duchamp included Baziotes’s work in his 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, and the following year, his work appeared in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. In 1944, Guggenheim mounted Baziotes’s first solo exhibition, putting him in the company of Motherwell, Pollock, David Hare, and Clyfford Still, all of whom had their inaugural one-man shows at Art of This Century. In his review of the exhibition, Clement Greenberg extolled Baziotes as being “among the six or seven best painters we possess." (ii) Two years later, the Kootz Gallery held his second solo exhibition, and Baziotes joined Kootz’s stable of artists.
Baziotes was a prominent member of the New York School. In addition to his close friendships with abstract expressionist painters and sculptors, he was one of the “Irascibles” made famous in Nina Leen’s 1951 Life photograph, and in 1948, together with Motherwell, Hare, and Mark Rothko, he co-founded the Subjects of the Artist School, an artists group that provided a forum to discuss the issues at stake in contemporary painting. But despite his intimate ties with the world of abstract expressionism, Baziotes’s artwork remained rooted in his own personal take on surrealism: a lyrical, biomorphic abstraction less interested in accessing the unconscious and more concerned with adopting a mysterious and haunted quality, which he imparted through luminous color and eerily foreboding forms.
In the later part of his brief life, Baziotes began to teach extensively at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York University, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) People’s Art Center, and Hunter College. In 1961, Sidney Janis included Baziotes in the Ten American Painters exhibition at his gallery. Two years later, Baziotes died in New York. He has been the subject of several posthumous solo exhibitions including one at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (1965) and most recently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2004-2005).
-Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
- Creator:William Baziotes (1912-1963, American)
- Creation Year:1955
- Dimensions:Height: 14.5 in (36.83 cm)Width: 17.5 in (44.45 cm)Depth: 0.5 in (1.27 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Not examined outside of vintage frame but appears fine. (frame is vintage).
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1745216473262
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