Color Field Queens: Female Artists of the 1970s @ Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

Color Field Queens: Female Artists of the 1970s

Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

August 3 – September 21, 2024

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Color Field Queens, an exhibition of works by Alice Baber, Beryl Barr-Sharrar, Sherron Francis, Dorothy Fratt, Sheila Isham, Emily Mason, Betty Parsons, Vivian Springford, Hilda Shapiro Thorpe, and Takako Yamaguchi. The ten artists in the presentation are united not only by gender, but also by their significant and underappreciated contributions to the Color Field movement in the 1970s.

The term Color Field Painting was coined by American critic Clement Greenberg on the occasion of a 1964 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In considering the selection of works from the 1970s presented in Color Field Queens in the terms of Greenberg’s definition of Color Field painting, key techniques and attributes unify these artists under Greenberg’s movement. In many of the works, paint is thinned into delicate washes and blooming swaths of color. The resultant forms deliver sumptuous tones, uninterrupted by brush strokes that would suggest the presence of the hand behind them.

The Color Field movement had robust roots in both Washington D.C. and New York City in the decade leading up to Greenberg’s defining exhibition. In 1957, Sheila Isham (1927–2024) established a studio practice in D.C. and joined a group known as the Society of Washington Printmakers. In the same period, D.C. native Dorothy Fratt (1923–2017) began showing as a student in D.C. at the Corcoran School of Art and the Phillips Collection, ultimately joining the group that would become the Washington Color School.

Color Field painting became formally linked to Washington D.C with the 1965 exhibition Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, featuring work by Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, among others. The exhibition solidified the formation of the Washington Color School, uniting a “second generation” of artists in the movement who showed at the Washington Gallery as well as the Jefferson Place Gallery, co-founded by Kenneth Noland. Hilda Shapiro Thorpe (1920–2000) exhibited regularly in this cohort alongside the highest-profile woman tied to the movement, Alma Thomas. 

“A good part of the reaction against Abstract Expressionism is, as I've already suggested, a continuation of it,” wrote Clement Greenberg; as such, in addition to D.C., the Color Field movement had a robust presence in the birthplace of Abstract Expressionism, New York City. During this key period of growth for the Color Field movement, Vivian Springford (1913–2003) remained an active member of the local artist community, shifting from showing at the Great Jones Gallery, the Preston Gallery, and the Visual Arts Coalition.

Around this same time in the 1960s, Beryl Barr-Sharrar (b. 1935) was living and working in Paris, where she encountered notable American artists working in a similar visual language, including Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Alice Baber (1928–1982). Alice Baber spent ample time in Paris as well as in New York, where she co-founded March Gallery, one of the select 10th Street galleries. New York-born Emily Mason (1932–2019), another member of the grouping, ran in these same circles, showing at the artist-run Area Gallery.

It is on the heels of this highly generative period of Abstraction in New York that Sherron Francis (b. 1940) moved to Soho in 1968. Joining a community of artists that included Larry Poons, Larry Zox, and Peter Bradley, Sherron Francis began showing with Andre Emmerich upon being introduced to the renowned gallerist by fellow artist Dan Christensen in 1971. In 1973, Andre Emmerich Gallery held solo shows of work by Sherron Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann, and Washington Color School painter Kenneth Noland. Legendary art dealer Betty Parsons (1900–1982), whose famed gallery was located on East 57th Street, was also producing colorful found wood assemblages during the 1970s. The youngest artist of this group show, Takako Yamaguchi (b. 1952), was strongly associated with the Pattern and Decoration Movement (P&D), which found its roots in the mid-1970s.

Color Field Queens reflects Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s core mission to showcase the wide array of American artists who made significant contributions to art history but faced institutional barriers that allowed their names to be forgotten by time.

LINCOLN GLENN GALLERY

542 West 24th Street, New York, NY

www.lincolnglenn.com

Arthur Dove @ Schoelkopf Gallery, New York – Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone – Inaugural Exhibition of the New Location of the Gallery in Tribeca

Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone 

Schoelkopf Gallery, New York 

September 29 – December 1, 2023 

Arthur Dove, 1880–1946

Tanks and Snowbank, 1933

Oil and metallic paint on canvas in the artist’s frame, 18 x 24 inches

Photo Credit: Roz Akin | Private Collection, courtesy of Schoelkopf Gallery

Schoelkopf Gallery debuts its new Tribeca location at 390 Broadway, with an exhibition dedicated to pioneering American painter ARTHUR DOVE (1880–1946). The exhibition presents a dynamic selection of increasingly nonrepresentational works that trace Arthur Dove’s evolution as a painter and reveal his unyielding interrogation of established artistic convention. 

The exhibition Arthur Dove: Yes, I Could Paint a Cyclone brings together over 70 significant works in various media, including oil, pastel, watercolor and charcoal. These pieces are drawn from distinguished foundations and private collections across North America, revealing Arthur Dove's profound influence and innovation in 20th century art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by leading Dove scholar Rachael DeLue, Professor in American art at Princeton and author of the monograph Arthur Dove: Always Connect (2016).

Arthur Dove's career began in 1903 as an illustrator in New York before his transformative experiences in France in 1908–09, when he participated in the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Inspired by French modernist master Henri Matisse, Arthur Dove began to experiment with a painterly approach that would redefine American art.

Arthur Dove's breakthrough came in 1912 when legendary gallerist Alfred Stieglitz exhibited his groundbreaking series of daringly abstract pastels known today as the Ten Commandments (1911–12). These works marked the earliest expressions of his unique nonrepresentational style, provoking both controversy and excitement. His art captured the essence of nature, light, sound, and sensation in a liminal zone between abstraction and representation.

Throughout his career, Arthur Dove challenged traditional modes of expression, cementing his status as a pioneering painter and thinker within the emergence of abstraction in twentieth-century modernism. In the late 1930s, Arthur Dove and his wife, fellow artist Helen Torr, settled in Centerport, Long Island, where Dove continued to redefine his style. Despite declining health, he created works featuring geometric and biomorphic forms, foreshadowing movements like Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting.

Helmed by Andrew Schoelkopf, the gallery presents innovative and important works of American art encompassing both abstract and realist movements, while also shedding light on American artists deserving of greater attention. The gallery’s robust program celebrates the entire sweep of the American modernist movement from 1875 through present day. Schoelkopf Gallery’s move to Tribeca marks a significant milestone in its storied history, bringing a rich array of American art to the vibrant neighborhood. The new 4,800-square-foot gallery space allows the gallery to share its commitment to American art with a larger audience, as well as to support collectors, scholars, museums and the public with a program that expands the canon and creates community.

"Schoelkopf Gallery's new location in Tribeca is the physical embodiment of many changes in our business and in the field of American art. The location offers distinct physical spaces to enhance the gallery's programming and it gives our team more opportunities to tailor personal experiences for the most active collectors of American art.  Over the last five years, more than 30% of the buyers from our gallery are those new to the field or who have not worked with us previously. This figure is the highest I have observed in my career and indicates there is a growing community for American art that is eager to learn more about the American Modernist movement." 

SCHOELKOPF GALLERY

390 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013

schoelkopfgallery.com

Kenneth Noland @ Yares Art, New York – Context is the Key, Paintings: 1958-1970

Kenneth Noland 

Context is the Key, Paintings: 1958-1970

Yares Art, New York

October 9, 2021 – February 26, 2022

Kenneth Noland 

Fete, 1959

Magna on canvas, 69 x 68 ½ in. (175.3 x 174 cm)

© The Estate of Kenneth Noland, courtesy Yares Art

Yares Art  presents Kenneth Noland: Context is the Key, Paintings: 1958-1970, an exhibition of more than thirty works by one of the twentieth century’s most radical and influential American painters. The show focuses on abstract compositions that Kenneth Noland produced from 1958 to 1970, which had a significant impact on the course of contemporary art. These compositions with bold, spare, captivating forms and sumptuous color relationships, emphasize the objecthood of the artwork and the flatness of the picture plane. At the time they were painted, Kenneth Noland’s artworks were viewed as surprising and daring. Now widely acknowledged as classics of post-war abstraction, they are still as audacious and imposing as ever—and their influence may be observed today in the work of younger generations of artists.

Among the highlights of the show are examples of Kenneth Noland’s most appreciated series of early large-scale works, including the Circles, Chevrons, Diamonds, and Stripes. Fete (1959), one of the artist's most iconic Circles, is composed of a precisely executed blue dot inside concentric bands of poured and splashed blue, yellow, and black paint emanating from hard-edge inner circles of white and blue. Pierced along the outer edge are five irregular, diagonal black lines. The work effectively bridges Abstract Expressionism with the then-nascent Color Field movement in painting, of which Kenneth Noland was a principal leader. Half Time (1964), one of the artist's seminal Chevron paintings, depicts a green triangle and equivalent bands of purple, brown, red, and orange pressing from the top center toward the bottom of a blaring white field. The stark composition corresponds to the Minimalist aesthetic in avant-garde painting of the time.

Kenneth Noland’s passion, however, lay in the various ways color can activate the surface of the canvas, even in its most lightly nuanced manifestations, as in the diamond-shaped canvas Datum (1966) with its four diagonal bands of analogous tones of blues and gray-greens. Five richly colored horizontal bands of equal proportions - with one extremely thin, almost silent band atop, stretching the entire length of Kenneth Noland.

KENNETH NOLAND (1924 - 2010)

Kenneth Clifton Noland was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1924. After serving in the Army Air Forces, he enrolled in the fabled Black Mountain College, where he studied with Bauhaus maestro Josef Albers, abstractionist Ilya Bolotowsky, architect Buckminster Fuller, and composer John Cage. Noland’s first New York solo show was held at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1957. Since then, his work has been the subject of numerous gallery and museum solo exhibitions worldwide. He died, age 85, at his home in Port Clyde, Maine, in 2010.

Kenneth Noland participated in the 1964 Venice Biennale, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, hosted his first retrospective in 1977, which traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.

His work is included in many of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among numerous others.

YARES ART

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NI 10151

www.yaresart.com

Artist Gene Davis Exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York

Gene Davis

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York

June 3 – July 17, 2010

Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe presents an exhibition of paintings by GENE DAVIS (1920-1985). 

Gene Davis is associated with the Washington Color School, established in Washington D.C. in the late 1950’s through the 1960’s along with Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Part of the larger color field movement, the artists of the Washington Color School were identified in an exhibition entitled “Washington Color Painters”, shown at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. Known for minimal, orderly and colorful paintings using stripes, washes and single fields of colors, the group was largely dedicated to the formal use of color.

The stripe was to Gene Davis as the cruciform was to Reinhardt and for four decades it was a continuing source of invention in his painting. Gene Davis played his color stripes like notes and cords on a piano, some are dominate, some are sharp, occasionally he adds an inharmonious dissonant or a singular grace note - an appoggiatura against which other colors in the painting are weighed. The eye scans his field of stripes, selecting first a single color and then chromatic groups. The improvisation of perpetually unfolding, overlapping, echoing, regrouping, unending complexity become a chromatic fugue.

Gene Davis was included in seminal exhibitions during his lifetime including “Post Painterly Abstraction” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964 curated by Clement Greenberg, and “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 curated by William Seitz. Davis's work is represented in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California.

AMERINGER | McENERY | YOHE

525 W 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011

www.ameringer-yohe.com

Kenneth Noland : New Circles at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Kenneth Noland : New Circles

Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

3 October - 5 November 2001

This exhibition at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery is Kenneth Noland’s first in London for 20 years and gives us a opportunity to look again at the career of this important artist.

Kenneth Noland is a major figure in American abstract painting. After visiting Helen Frankenthaler with Clement Greenberg in the late 50s he and Morris Louis developed the method of staining bare canvas with pure colour. This development gave permission for minimalism to take shape. The early paintings were concentric circles of different colours usually with a painterly flare on the outer edge. Subsequently Kenneth Noland used massively extended rectangles, chevrons flared shapes and surfboard shapes. Concerned with making apparent the fact of the painting itself without outside references he used symmetrical compositions where the shapes on the canvas echoed or were referential to the shape of the canvas.

For these new paintings Kenneth Noland has returned to a format which he first used in the late 50s, the circle in the square. These New Circles are, however, different to the earlier ones, the surface slickly painted, the colours vibrant but synthetic. They seem almost high-tech and forbidding in contrast to the inviting matte surfaces and warm colour of the earlier work. In some cases metallic paint is used in others a dichromatic paint giving the paintings an optical effect.

Now in his 70’s Kenneth Noland has continued to be influential to generations of younger artists from Frank Stella to the artist/critic Matthew Collings. A revival of interest in colour field painting has resulted in a target painting by Kenneth Noland from the ‘60s selling at auction recently for nearly $800,000

In critic Karen Wilkin's words "it is neither an overstatement nor an over simplification to say that his recent Circle pictures are like a diary of everything Noland has discovered in his lifetime."

Kenneth Noland is represented in many major museum collections throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.

BERNARD JACOBSON GALLERY

14A Clifford Street, London W1S 4JX

www.jacobsongallery.co.uk