Tuesday, July 21, 2015 - 11:55 AM
Life@ReadingEagle.com
Reading, PA
Art review: Reading son Baziotes' watercolors reflect an era
Sunday July 19, 2015 12:01 AM
By Ron Schira - Reading Eagle correspondent
If you go
The Allentown Art Museum is at 31 N. Fifth St., Allentown.
Call 610-432-4333 or visit www.allentownartmuseum.org for hours and additional
information.
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| Baziotes, Yellow Creature on Tightrope, 1936-39 |
ALLENTOWN - "William Baziotes: Surrealist
Watercolors," showing through Aug. 23 at the Allentown Art Museum Payne
Hurd Gallery, is a collection of 24 small paintings discovered years after the
artist's death in a box of his belongings. Dated between 1936 to 1939, they are
reported to have rarely, if ever, been seen before.
Born in Pittsburgh and reared in Reading, Baziotes
(1912-1963) moved to New York City in 1933, where he attended the National
Academy of Design and then worked on the New Deal Projects sponsored by the
Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression.
During the late 1930s he met a number of artists, most
importantly the Chilean emigre Roberto Matta Echaurren, who had introduced him
to Surrealism. Shortly thereafter he joined with Jackson Pollock, Robert
Motherwell and other artists to found the emerging seminal movement of Abstract
Expressionism. His first solo exhibition was, remarkably, in 1944 at Peggy
Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery.
Although he did share the group's interest in primitive art
and automatism, his work is associated more with European Surrealism, whose major
proponents fled Europe to avoid the impending rise of Fascism and make New York
City their new, albeit temporary, home. These paintings are expressive of that
movement and plant the seeds for his later, more complex pieces.
Vertical, about 12 by 9 inches each, these dramatic images
are spontaneous in their execution and elicit circus performers, figures on a
beach, howling monsters and/or otherwise grotesque caricatures of inhumane
existence.
The threat of war and the violence of the times found its release
in these works and echo Picasso's screaming horse from Guernica and Miro's
"Aid Spain" posters. Both of these artists have profoundly influenced
these pieces, particularly his women on a beach from Picasso's Dinard period
and two distorted bull heads.
For other examples, "Howling Creature" or
"Yellow Creature" are screaming their hearts out at the sky,
symbolically beseeching a higher power to intervene and stop the tyrannical
cruelty of dictatorial regimes.
"Yellow Creature on a Tightrope" or "Dancing
on a Ball" each express the state of precarious and dangerous balance the
world was experiencing, just as "Funeral" evokes what become the true
spoils of war.
I am impressed with how well these works held up against
time, notably on paper, as the colors and surfaces appear next to unblemished.
It also appears to me that they may have all been completed in one pass since
they are so close in size, style and color scheme.
On loan from the Susan Teller Gallery in New York City, this
impressive exhibition of Baziotes' early work offers insight toward
understanding his enigmatic later work; the pieces are painted lightly but the
subject matter is dark in a bold, tragicomic irony. Anybody interested in his
art should see this show.
Contact Ron Schira: life@readingeagle.com.
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