Ruth Kligman

Untitled (Abstract in Black and White)

1961

Words and Deeds Oil and collage on wood panel, c. 1990 Signed recto lower right (see photo) Verso: See photo Signed, verso: Ben Wilson Dated: c. 1990 Titled: Words and Deeds Condition: Excellent Image/panel size: 23 1/4 x 19 inches Frame size: 26 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches To gain exposure to a wider range of styles, he also studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Educational Alliance. Admired by critics throughout his long career, Wilson was singled out as a “discovery” by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewel even before his rst one-man show at the Galerie Neuf in 1946. His paintings of the ’30s and ’40s were expressionistically rendered, often Biblical parables, lled with what he called “the grief of the intolerable” and reecting an acute awareness of the agony of the time, from the Holocaust to the Spanish Civil War. A WPA artist who identied strongly with the plight of the Jews in Europe, he relentlessly explored themes of war, torment, and futility in his early decades of painting. When times changed and social pressures subsided, Wilson’s mood lifted. He spent 1952-54 in Paris working at the Academie Julien. During the ’50s his involvement with specic imagery persisted but became more psychological and mythic in orientation. Inuenced by Cubism, he created a vocabulary of interlocking shapes and bold, sweeping gestures that served as a transition between his early gurative expressionism and his later abstract constructivist concerns. Towards the end of the decade Wilson reached a crossroads, moving towards abstraction and searching for what he called “a scaffolding under the externals.” By 1960, inuenced by the Russian Constructivists, Mondrian, and Abstract Expressionism, Wilson turned to abstraction. Reexamining the basic elements of painting, he evolved his own personal vocabulary and structure, fusing the cerebral and the emotive. He became increasingly experimental, using house paint, sand, and other unorthodox materials in paintings that he worked from all directions, dripping, spraying, stenciling, and collaging. He employed elements of disjunction, repetitions of geometric motifs, linear networks, and complex overlays to create the transparent, multi-layer development of space that characterizes his later paintings. A consummate draftsman, Wilson lled notebook after notebook with drawings that he amplied in his paintings. Eschewing popular movements, Wilson was always one to pursue a personal aesthetic. Despite more than 30 one-man shows and 50 years of teaching, he increasingly withdrew from the gallery scene but continued to paint daily until his death at age 88 in 2001 in Blairstown, New Jersey, where he and his sculptor wife Evelyn Wilson...

Acrylic on canvas embedded with glitter and gold leaf Unsigned, as per usual Provenance: Estate of the artist Sheet: 14 x 17" Peter Marks (1935 -2010...