SALLY MICHEL: FIELDS OF COLOR

Sept 14- Nov 22, 2017

Essay | Selected Exhibitions and Museum Collections | New York Times Review

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Essay by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History, Bard College

When asked, two years after the death of her husband, whether she should be referred to as “Sally Michel or Mrs. Milton Avery”, she replied, “They’re both one and the same.”* Sally Michel married the painter Milton Avery, seventeen years older than she, in 1926 and thereafter her life was intertwined with his. She was a young artist, totally dedicated to painting. In him she found someone equally committed to making art, her life companion until his death in 1965. He had an approach to painting that she found valid and would practice for the rest of her career: “We actually had a lot of the same ideas about art even before we met.…” What attracted him when they met in Gloucester was that, like him, she was up early each morning, going outside with her art materials to make oil paintings.

Art historian Robert Hobbs described the Avery marriage as “a relationship with few parallels in the history of art.” While her commitment to making her own art never wavered, Michel had no problem putting him in the foreground, working to support him financially and promoting his art, while steadily practicing her own painting, usually side by side with him. “I wanted all the spotlight to be on Milton.” “And I really thought Milton’s work was really so much more important than mine.” She did commercial artwork for twenty years so he could devote all his time to painting. In large part the uniqueness of their relationship lay in the fact that she was genuinely happy helping him to be a full-time artist while she made her art in his shadow. She worked on commercial illustration jobs at home, so they were almost constantly together. The day before their daughter was born she made a drawing for Bamberger’s department store that was picked up from the hospital. Avery was not a prima donna—he helped around the house, washing diapers and doing dishes and some of the cooking. She wrote his letters; “and... all those statements that were made for magazines and when they asked for credos, I just wrote up something. . . But actually, I was saying what I knew he thought.” As artist and writer Frederick Wight observed, “Sally Avery speaks for her husband, bridging over his shyness; or rather he speaks through her, since it is obvious that she says what he needs said.” They fit together like two interlocking color areas in one of their paintings, complementing and strengthening each other.

Their art developed together. Curator Barbara Haskell has pointed out that when Avery moved to New York to pursue Michel he had not yet experienced the modernist art that had burst out in Europe and was making an impact in the New York art world. His style had developed out of late 19th century American prototypes. After he relocated and they were married (as Michel said, “He chased me until I caught him”) he started painting with flatter, more simplified shapes. When Avery and Michel met in Gloucester they were painting outside, but once they settled in New York they preferred to sketch on paper outdoors and then develop their sketches into oil paintings on canvas at home.

Most of Michel’s paintings in this exhibition are landscapes, a traditional genre both Avery and Michel often practiced, especially during their summer travels. The earliest here date from 1953, when Avery’s art was gradually selling better and the couple was beginning to see the end of two decades of living frugally. Red Landscape and Birch, both from 1953, modest sized, vertical paintings centered on trees, typify Michel’s style at this point. The two paintings share an avoidance of realist detail, and a flattening out of landscape space, but they are distinctly different in color, with Birch featuring tans and a rich range of cool blues and blue greys, while Red Landscape ranges from muted reds to hotter oranges with only a few dots of green to ignite the scene through contrast. The emphasis on radiant color parallels the Averys’ friend, Mark Rothko’s paintings from the same years, with the difference that the Averys always kept a connection to the real world in their imagery and never ventured into total abstraction.

When she painted these two tree paintings Michel was supporting her husband with commercial jobs. Her mainstay was illustrating a weekly parenting column for the New York Times. She did this for twenty years; once she retired in 1960 the column was cancelled. These black and white illustrations demonstrate another side of her talent, the drawing skill that drew her to being an artist when she was a child. A scene of a youthful party features eighteen figures, a crowd never seen in her paintings, where broad, flat forms that are vehicles for color are the rule. The people are economically characterized and each individual activity is precisely captured. In the bottom left corner a girl draws the lettering for a party announcement, the one person involved in drawing—an alter-ego common in these drawings, which often feature images of girls making art (and often, as here, resembling her daughter, March). The Averys were aloof from politics, interested only in their painting. Milton never voted, and although they lived through the Depression and World War II there are few traces of these historic events in their painting. There are a few exceptions in Michel’s drawings for the Times, when the text in the article called for it—for example a drawing from 1941 where a boy plays with toy soldiers on the floor while his parents both anxiously read newspapers and the radio blares, “Battles, Italy, Greece, WAR.” In these drawings, Michel masterfully captured psychological and narrative moments, which makes clear that she deliberately rejected these qualities in her paintings for the sake of form and color.

It is well known that in the 1930s and 1940s Avery was an inspiring figure for a group of ambitious younger artists who would become famous as Abstract Expressionist painters: Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman. They admired his dedication to his art and his individualistic style, which built on developments of European modernism against the prevailing trends in American painting. They visited constantly and took vacations together. Like Michel, the wives of the younger artists supported their husbands, though they did not share her absolute commitment to painting at the same time. “No, I don’t think any of the women were as dedicated as I was to art. I was really dedicated to art and they were dedicated to their men, and if they painted, okay, but art was really like the Holy Grail.” Unlike Avery, who came from a Protestant family, the younger artists were Jewish, as was Michel. Her family was observant and not pleased that she married a non-Jew. Once she married she was no longer invited to their Sabbath meals, though they gradually came to accept Avery. After he died in 1965 Michel began to travel internationally, not only to Europe but also twice to Africa, and she also made five trips to Jerusalem, suggesting that she had an identification with her Jewish background despite her nonobservant lifestyle.

“I tell you, when I think of the fate of women it just wrings my heart. . . . It’s terrible,” Michel said in an interview with Nancy Acord where she told the story of her parents. Her father came to the United States from Poland; after some years he decided he wanted to marry and returned to Poland to find a wife. He settled on Michel’s mother who agreed to marry him on the condition that they remain in Poland. He assented, they married, and the next day he put her on the boat to the United States. Several years later, after they had two of their eventual five surviving children and his finances were bad, he sent her back to Poland to live with his family for a year and a half before calling her back to the U.S. Michel concluded this part of the interview stating, “I’m not a feminist but I’m a humanist.” Like some other women artists of the time, such as Helen Frankenthaler, she claimed, “Personally, I wish there wasn’t so much emphasis on women. I think there should be more emphasis on good work and bad work. To be judged not by whether you’re a woman or not but by whether you’re a good artist or not.” She also felt, “I think my work right now is naturally influenced by Milton. I couldn’t help it having lived with him so long. I hope it’s more feminine because I’m a female.” Today “feminine” is a loaded term, but perhaps she was referring to the delicacy plus the sophisticated use of pattern found in her commercial drawings and made blunter in some of her paintings, such as Ida, a portrait of family friend Ida Baumbach (the grandmother of film director Noah Baumbach). Lost in thought or sleeping, Ida is surrounded by dazzling colors while the grid of the table plays a visual game, making a pattern of multicolored diamonds from the orange of her dress, grey from the background, and a sly bit of pink from her leg.

Michel’s practice of travelling extensively began two months after Avery passed away, when he had an exhibition in London and the dealers persuaded her to come. She was economically independent, thanks to Avery’s success in the art market in his last years, and free to pursue her own art full time. She bought a house in Bearsville, outside of Woodstock, and its serene surroundings became the subject of many of her works. A photo documents her practice of sketching outdoors, the subject her grandson and friends relaxing on the lawn in Bearsville, a casual gathering of the sort that inspired paintings like Bill and Friends. Her paintings became larger now that she had more space to paint and was not doing commercial work any more, and they are thinly and quickly painted, giving a sense of watercolor-like luminosity and a casual spontaneity. She had a horror of paintings that looked labored: “I think it just ruins it. I have worked on paintings like that for a long time but I usually throw them away in the end. I mean all the life and all the joy goes out of them.”

It would seem that the grace that characterized Michel’s art and her life had its source in her positive and upbeat personality: “I was always an optimist.” “Have you ever been sad a day in your life, Sally?” interviewer Acord asked her somewhat incredulously. Of course she had been but her overall affirmative attitude was manifested in her art, like Studio View (1977), a rare urban scene, gridded like a Mondrian, but with an array of thinly brushed pastel colors.

Her Bearsville house afforded Michel a variety of landscape subjects: it is on a hill, surrounded by trees, above a pasture where cows often grazed before distant mountains. In Last Snow (1984), one of her late landscapes, she transformed the geography before her into areas of radiant, unrealistic color. A sketch for the painting exists, where she roughed out the basic composition and included some color notes. The notes indicate a yellow ground plane with tan accents; these she brightened into pink in the actual painting. She added a pale brown sky, a duller version of the bright yellow below, to create a field of warm yellows punctuated by darker hues representing trees and a mountain.

While Michel often denied any narrative interpretations of paintings, saying of Avery’s “they have no literary content,” on another occasion she said, “Every painting is an adventure. . . .You’re really delving into all your memories and things that have happened to you.” A Bearsville painting, Orange Sky (1977), where three cows hit individual color notes against a pale green pasture, evokes the summer of 1930 with her husband in Collinsville, Connecticut: “That whole summer we spent wandering after cows and making sketches. One farmer had these cows that used to travel about a mile for pasture, so we’d walk in back of them sketching, picking up apples and pears to eat.” The mountains and bands of foliage undulate peacefully under the livid orange sky, in a painting that affirms the present while also recalling an idyllic past.

“I think a painting should look as if it just happened. It should be a miracle.” “I really feel sorry for people that can’t paint because it’s so much fun to paint and it makes every day an adventure.”

NOTES

*This essay follows “Sally Michel: Working Artist” which I wrote for the Sally Michel: Rhythms of Light and Color catalogue of Michel’s November 2015 exhibition at D. Wigmore Fine Art. There is necessarily some repetition but I have tried to cover new ground. Instead of footnoting my sources I will cite them below. Because she lived to age 100 and was an open person she gave several lengthy interviews which have been among my main sources: interview with Dorothy Gees Seckler, November 3, 1967, Archives of American Art; four-part interview with Louis Sheaffer, December 1978-February 1979, Columbia Center for Oral History; interview with Tom Wolf, February 19 and March 19, 1982, Archives of American Art; and interview with Nancy Acord, Fresno Art Museum, December 2 and 3, 1989. All the quotations from Sally Michel in my text come from these interviews. Other sources cited are: Robert Hobbs, “Sally Michel: The Other Avery,” Woman’s Art Journal, Fall 1987/Winter 1988, 5; Frederick S. Wight, Milton Avery, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1952, 9; Barbara Haskell, Milton Avery, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982, 40f. Michel’s “WAR” drawing illustrates the “Parent and Child” column, “Mental Hygiene” by Catherine MacKenzie, The New York Times (magazine section), Sunday, February 9, 1941, 22. In writing this essay I am grateful for the encouragement and assistance of Deedee Wigmore, Emily Lenz, March Avery Cavanaugh, Sean A. Cavanaugh and Melissa De Medeiros at The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, and at Bard College, Jeanette McDonald.

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Modernism 1913-1950 | Realism of the 1930s and 1940s | Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s | Post-War | Selected Biographies

CHARLES GREEN SHAW: PAINTING IN AN AMERICAN RHYTHM

November 2016 - February 2017

Essay | Biography

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Essay by Emily Lenz

Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974) contributed to the development of American abstraction in the 1930s and 1940s through his own work and his involvement in three important New York art circles. He is most associated with the Park Avenue Cubists, a group of wealthy artists who provided connections between New York and Paris during the Great Depression. Shaw was in fact not as wealthy as his fellow Park Avenue Cubists A.E. Gallatin (1881-1952), George L.K. Morris (1905-1975), and Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). This freed him from social and family responsibilities, allowing Shaw to spend more time in his studio and develop friendships with a broad group of abstract artists. Shaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group, established in 1936 when forty artists banded together to promote abstraction through annual exhibitions open to the public. In the AAA’s early years, Shaw worked to find gallery space and sponsors for their exhibitions. Shaw was also part of the circle around Hilla Rebay, curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). When the museum opened in 1939, Rebay included Shaw in a number of group exhibitions and gave Shaw solo exhibitions in 1940 and 1941. Additionally Shaw advanced abstraction through his advisory board position at the Museum of Modern Art (1936-1941) and his illustrated children’s books intended to introduce abstraction to younger generations.

Many of Charles Green Shaw’s choices in early life laid the foundation for his later interest in abstraction. He took a general science degree at Yale University that mixed science, math, and the liberal arts, graduating in 1914. He began a graduate degree in Architecture at Columbia University that was cut short when Shaw enlisted in World War I, serving in the Army’s Air Service. His keen sense of observation was first applied to journalism, writing for The New Yorker, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair through the 1920s. Shaw began art lessons in 1926, studying briefly with Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) at the Art Students League then more extensively with George Luks (1867-1933). Shaw set out for Paris in 1929 and stayed in Europe through 1933. There, Shaw’s eyes were opened to abstraction through the Cubist work of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Juan Gris (1887-1927). From 1930 to 1935, Shaw worked through Cubism to find an American version that was simplified and more geometric. This is seen in Three Pear Composition, 1935 which has a Cubist still life composition and faux bois elements, but Shaw treats the pears as biomorphic forms and replaces the tabletop with a mass of projecting geometric shapes.

In the early 1930s, Shaw worked alone developing his abstract vocabulary. When he returned to New York in 1933, he knew no other abstract artists working in the city. That changed in the spring of 1935 when Shaw met A. E. Gallatin (1881-1952), a wealthy collector who opened his collection of European Modernism to the public as The Gallery of Living Art on NYU campus. The gallery was the earliest public institution to show abstraction. After Gallatin’s first visit to Shaw’s studio, he returned with George L.K. Morris (1905-1975), who acted as curator for the Gallery of Living Art. The two purchased a painting for the gallery’s collection and selected eight of Shaw’s paintings for a solo exhibition, breaking the museum’s protocol of group exhibitions only. In the summer of 1935, Shaw traveled to Paris with Gallatin and Morris who provided introductions to many great painters. Conversant in both French and German, Shaw had no problem communicating with the array of European artists working in Paris at the time. In 1936 in response to Alfred Barr excluding Americans from his two major exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism, Gallatin, Morris, and Shaw organized an exhibition called Five Contemporary American Concretionists at the Reinhardt Gallery that included Shaw, Morris, John Ferren (1905-1970), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), and Charles Biederman (1906-2004). The exhibition traveled to Paris at the Galerie Pierre and to London at the Mayor Gallery with Gallatin replacing Calder as the fifth artist.

The exhibition at D. Wigmore considers the evolution of Charles Green Shaw’s style from the early 1930s through the mid-1940s as Shaw works his way through Cubism and Surrealism to find his own American voice. The dynamic energy of New York became Shaw’s source for an American abstraction. Shaw noted the broken patterns of the modern city where rhythmic movement was seen in every direction, from the geometry of sidewalks repaired and repaved to an ever changing skyline as more skyscrapers were built. Shaw created abstractions based on his observations of the city. Shaw first evokes the city’s sky line with his Plastic Polygons constructions as seen in Day and Night Polygon, 1936 then in more nuanced ways in paintings of pure geometry. Shaw’s evolution from the 1930s to the 1940s can be demonstrated with comparisons of paintings from the D. Wigmore exhibition.

Shaw’s use of Cubism and his evolution towards pure geometry is shown when Chrysalis, 1935 and Divided Planes, 1943 are placed side-by-side. In Chrysalis, one sees Shaw’s debt to Picasso as a teacher. The sculptural form suggests a Picasso-like bust floating against a blue ground. Shaw rounds the forms with modeling to convey depth and volume. A black semi-circle stands in for an eye, suggesting both a woman’s profile and a point of access into the overall form. With Chrysalis next to Divided Planes, one sees not only a shared palette but also how Shaw flattened the biomorphic forms from Chrysalis into pure geometry in Divided Planes. Shaw creates depth in Divided Planes through layering of planes, achieved through a mix of stippling to imply transparency and overlapping of single colors. In place of an eye, Shaw uses a three-sided line to imply an opening into the composition of Divided Planes. The comparison of the two demonstrates how Shaw moved away from French abstraction into a streamlined geometry that may suggest horizons and vistas but is strictly non-objective.

Shaw’s distinct abstract voice has a playful side and an interest in breaking forms down into geometric shapes. This can been seen in a comparison of the drawing Self-Portrait, 1935 and the painting Refraction, 1940. In the 1935 drawing, Shaw depicts himself in hat, glasses, and tie with a spare use of line and shapes. The verticality of the portrait connects to his first Manhattan skyline paintings. The thick black band on his hat gives solidity to the composition and the elegant arrangement of circles and triangles in place of his eyes and nose its focal point. Already we see Shaw’s economy of line and paring down of the human figure into an arrangement of geometric shapes. Refraction, 1940 is a different type of portrait with the letters of Shaw’s last name appearing in the composition. The coiled black lines convey the springing motion that seems to have circulated the artist’s name around the canvas. In Refraction, Shaw has found a personal American abstraction- direct, streamlined, and witty. Refraction is forward looking with a proto-Pop sensibility. Its mixture of punchy design, self-reference, and primary colors are all elements that appear in Jasper Johns’s work two decades later.

In a 1968 oral history for the Archives of American Art, Shaw spoke of solidity, impact, balance, and tension as defining principles of his abstractions. Throughout his career, Shaw’s paintings reflect modern awareness of space, speed, and a shift from classic symmetry to dynamic movement in order to capture the energy of Twentieth Century life. As a result, Shaw achieved a distinctly American abstraction.

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1960s AMERICAN OP ART

September - November 2016

Essay | Biographies

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Essay by Emily Lenz

The 1960s was a rich period for geometric art in America. The presence of Bauhaus trained teachers in American art schools, new understanding of how the brain perceives color, and post-war advancements in plastics and paint lay the foundation for Op art, which questioned how we perceive space and movement. Op artists used an investigative approach to create new models for depicting space using only color and line to achieve movement that projects and recedes. The viewer’s participation in an active visual dialogue with a painting was fundamental; the ultimate goal being heightened awareness of what it means to see. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye identified Op as an international style. Our exhibition focuses on the Americans in The Responsive Eye, including six painters and two sculptors: Richard Anuszkiewicz (b.1930), Francis Celentano (1928-2016), Francis Hewitt (1936-1992); Bill Komodore (1932-2012), Mon Levinson (1926-2014), Reginald Neal (1909-1992), Julian Stanczak (b.1928), and Tadasky (b.1935). Celentano, Komodore, and Neal are newly represented by D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc and featured in the exhibition. Works in black and white are emphasized in the exhibition to show the diverse ways Op artist created movement through compositions focused on positive and negative space, without color adding another element of push-pull. In today’s computer age, the artworks in our exhibition appear calculated and mapped out, but all these composition resulted from experimentation and intuition in the artists’ studios.

Constructivist and Bauhaus attitudes to art and industry freed 1960s artists to explore new materials and plastics suited the enthusiasm for technology brought on by the Space Race. The plastic quality of new fast-drying acrylic paints allowed painters using tape to execute fine lines for complex compositions and color interactions with an oil-like richness. The two sculptors in our exhibition, Reginald Neal and Mon Levinson, used plastic in sheet form in their wall-mounted constructions because of its transparency and luminosity. Neal and Levinson both became interested in the moiré effect that occurs when two sets of parallel lines overlap for the effect’s simulation of movement as each change in the viewer’s sightline generates new patterns as the eye unconsciously ties together new points of intersection. In the 1950s Reginald Neal was an established artist and printmaker credited with advancing the development of color lithography. In the 1960s Neal’s work became more abstract as he considered the concept of time. In 1964 he merged lithography and sculpture by cutting his prints into symmetrical patterns faced with a layer of printed lines on Plexiglas, which he placed in plastic boxes to create spatial separation. In Hexagon Moiré, c.1966, a clear sheet of Plexiglas with printed white lines in a hexagon shape is mounted about an inch from a blue Plexiglas backboard with white concentric circles printed over black parallel lines. The effect is mesmerizing with new patterns of circles and shading created with the viewer’s movement. While Neal came to his constructions through printmaking, Levinson developed his constructions out of an interest in plastics. In 1964 Levinson started to make Plexiglas construction in black and white to examine how the intensity of the moiré effect could be controlled by the width, tone, and distance between the sets of lines, which he investigated with a series of construction between 1964 and 1967, as seen in Lateral Flow, 1966. In 1968 Levinson simplified his compositions to focus on the reflective properties of plastic using formal geometry to consider light as a raw material in his work.

Celentano, Hewitt, and Tadasky used optical blending to create a blur effect that suggests speed as colors meet and melt into one another. In Celentano’s work from 1965 to 1968, he repeated, rotated, and mirrored patterns in black and white to dizzying effect as seen in Zilos, 1966. In 1968 Celentano formulated a strategy for color and began his first color series titled Alpha using an airbrush to soften color transitions within ruled lines. In Alpha Reverse in Black and White, 1970, bands of gradient colors alternate with bands of constant color, giving the impression of pistons in motion. Celentano aimed to create visual instruments of dramatic tension by orchestrating color interactions within the confines of patterns and structures that control the perception of these forms. After spending four years developing his technique to execute perfect circles within a square canvas, Tadasky had mastered his craft by 1965. In C-182, 1965, Tadasky used optical blending to create a color shift from orange to white across a black circle that suggests the sun’s heat and light. He achieved this fading effect by applying an additional layer of yellow and then white as he worked his way to the center. Frank Hewitt was one of three artists who formed The Anonima Group in Cleveland in the early 1960s. Along with Ernst Benkert and Ed Mieczkowski, the group investigated the psychology of perception by setting a program of limits each artist would explore separately. In 1965 Anonima’s project was titled Black/White and Gray 24” Square with each artist contributing ten paintings for a New York exhibition that traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Galeria Foksal in Warsaw in 1966. Hewitt was the most painterly of the group with beautiful transitions from light to dark in his compositions. Though he set the program for the group, he broke the rules to incorporate touches of color like the maroon edges in Munchin’ Henries at Shaky Heights, 1965 to make the black and white composition pop.

In different ways, Anuszkiewicz and Komodore explore the tension between the center and edges of a canvas to address the ambiguous sense of space that results from an abstract painting no longer having the traditional figure-ground relationship of representational painting. With the rise of abstraction, the canvas’s surface became a dynamic space of indeterminate depth. Komodore addressed this by creating a single central field activated by the contrast of light and dark along the canvas edge as seen in Meander, 1967. All four 1967 paintings by Komodore in our exhibition explore the ambiguity between movement and stillness and closed and open spaces in an overall minimal composition. Richard Anuszkiewicz considered the edge’s ability to define an infinite center depth or projection, pinching and expanding the space by changing the density of the lines as seen in Unit, 1966. Anuszkiewicz embraced his teacher Josef Albers’s theories on color interaction and applied that understanding to measured, geometric compositions of precise linear patterns within gridded or square formats.

Stanczak also studied with Josef Albers at Yale and is unique with the American Op artists for his use of curved lines to provide organic rather than geometric movement. In Stanczak’s compositions of wiggles and juxtapositions of curved and angular forms, the paintings radiate energy and internal illumination, like Concurrent Oppositions, 1965. Stanczak’s method of taping challenged him to examine how the density of lines produced the sensation of measured space and unlimited movement. Because color is difficult to control, Stanczak would periodically turn to black and white to investigate the function of line in new ways.

The significance of Op Art as a movement is its fundamental shift from art as object to art as experience. A change that remains relevant today as a new generation of artists engage viewers through immersive approaches in painting, sculpture, video, and installations.

Biographies

Richard Anuszkiewicz

Francis Celentano

Francis Hewitt

Bill Komodore

Mon Levinson

Reginald Neal

Julian Stanczak

Tadasky

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Modernism 1913-1950 | Realism of the 1930s and 1940s | Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s | Post-War | Selected Biographies

PAUL JENKINS: COLOR AND FLOW

Feb 24 - May 3, 2016

Press Release | Chronology | Solo Exhibitions | Group Exhibitions
Museum Collections | 2009 New York Times Review
Some works may still be available, please contact the gallery at 212-581-1657.

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Press Release

D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. is pleased to announce its exhibition Paul Jenkins: Color and Flow featuring 12 canvases from 1956 to 1979. The exhibition offers a refined selection of all-over compositions in oil and enamel of 1956-1958, monochromatic works in acrylic from 1962-1963, and vibrant veil paintings of the 1970s. Across these decades, Paul Jenkins’ singular use of color and flow create an individualistic style that remains distinctively his.

The controlled flow of paint is fundamental to Jenkins’ technique. The balance of tension and timing essential to Jenkins’ work was something he first experienced working in a ceramics factory in high school. There Jenkins saw how the skilled ceramicists had to relinquish control to the heat of their kiln. As an artist, Jenkins replaced fire with the natural force of gravity, creating his imagery directly on the canvas during the act of pouring and manipulating the paint. As Albert Elsen wrote “his craft of painting is vital to the character of his imagery and to our prolonged enjoyment of it. What he has found in the confluence of chance, feeling and calculation is a sustaining source for richly diversified images.” (“Paul Jenkins: The Marvels of Occurrence,” Art International, March 2, 1964).

In the 1950s Paul Jenkins worked in oil and enamel, liquefying his medium to work in all-over compositions of color masses in sweeping movements. Throughout Jenkins’ career, color is essential to provide composition and structure. Yet the artist’s use of black and white is of equal importance in the three paintings from 1956-1958 in our exhibition. White chrysochrome enamel enabled Jenkins to create precise white lines as final points of contrast. In Skagerak, 1958, drifts of yellow rise from depths of blue and black while breaks of white chrysochrome lead the eye to the surface. In Albatross , 1956 flowing blacks are enlivened and shaped by reds and blues while openings of white chrysochrome act as a pathway out of the darkness. In Paris, 1957 amidst luminous flows of color is a core of black with calligraphic motions of white chrysochrome that lead the viewer into and up through the painting.

Helen Harrison noted the importance of movement in the 1950s works when she wrote, “Jenkins uses puddling, melting and chromatic blending to suggest movement not only across the surface but also beneath and beyond it.” (“Unveiling the Image,” text for Paul Jenkins in the 1950s: Space, Color, and Light, D. Wigmore Fine Art, 2005). Each 1950s painting in our exhibition is its own universe full of natural forces at work, creating a sense of scale independent of size with projecting and receding masses, a quality that makes Jenkins distinct among the leading Abstract Expressionists of the time.

A major transition in Paul Jenkins’ work came with his move to acrylic paints in 1960. As the artist continued to prepare the ground of his canvas to prevent the paint from soaking into the weave, acrylic allowed for greater manipulation and action in his paintings. At the same time, the role of white switched from the surface to the ground and Jenkins began to explore a more minimal, centered composition. Acrylic paints allowed Jenkins to achieve both opacity and translucency as seen in Phenomena Blue Ligeance, 1963 where blue paint is densely pooled in the lower half and thinly spread in a veil of blue-black in the top half. In the three paintings from 1962-1963 in our exhibition, Jenkins created complexly layered centered forms of limited color in contrast to the white background. In Phenomena Play of Trance, 1962 a rich red pushes out from a strongly delineated flow of near-black while a diagonal line anchors the base of the shape to the canvas. Gerald Nordland wrote of these new forms as “ambiguously flat and yet suggestive of both softness and stone-like solidity.”

By 1960 Jenkins titled his works beginning with Phenomena, which as Helen Harrison wrote, opened “the door to multiple interpretations of imagery that has no specific counterpart in nature yet seems somehow to refer to the natural world.” Each Jenkins canvas serves as its own world, engaging the viewer in his or her own memories and experiences. The titles in our exhibition evoke a sense of exploration with references to water, geology, and spirituality in distant lands.

The 1970s paintings in our exhibition demonstrate Jenkins’ mastery of technique and medium which he used to move freely between order and chaos. Phenomena Spectrum Hour Glass, 1974 and Phenomena Prayer Rug, 1975 recall elements of 1950s works with their all-over composition and turbulent movement. Granular white veils now replace chrysochrome to provide accents of light. These paintings have an atmospheric quality with evocations of natural forces of weather and sedimentation. In contrast, Phenomena Sufi Procession, 1974 and Phenomena Ore Shaft, 1974 show orderly veils of multiple colors that immerse the viewer in celebrations of color and calm. In both paintings, Jenkins uses the fast-drying nature of acrylic paints to move between distinct colors in translucent and opaque veils that overlap yet remain separate. Structure and movement come together in Phenomena Maimonides Mantle, 1979 where colors flow from a central point into joyous plumes of color. A granular quality in the central veils of purple and blue provides an additional dimension of texture. For Jenkins’ individual and distinct style, the flexibility of acrylic paint proved to be his ideal medium. In the 1970s Paul Jenkins’ technical expertise gave him great freedom to explore different forms of movement and structure depending on where his process led him resulting in a wider range of compositions.

Paul Jenkins used color and flow as tools to create paintings that remain timeless and continue to engage the viewer today in a moment of awe and imagination. As Jenkins said in his monograph Anatomy of a Cloud, “Abstractions are extractions from nature. Concentrates of nature.”

All images Ⓒ 2016 Estate of Paul Jenkins

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Modernism 1913-1950 | Realism of the 1930s and 1940s | Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s | Post-War | Selected Biographies

HUNT DIEDERICH: MAKING SCULPTURE MODERN

Jan 6 - Feb 13, 2016

Essay | Biography | For further inquiries, call 212-581-1657.

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Essay by Emily Lenz

D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. is pleased to present with the family of William Hunt Diederich (1884-1953) a selection of works that show Diederich’s mastery of many media from 1914 to 1929. On view January 6 – February 13, 2016, the exhibition includes sculpture, metalworks, ceramics, silhouettes, and drawings. Diederich was a modernist who expanded the meaning of sculpture to keep it relevant in the 20th century. In his first major New York solo exhibition in 1920, he said, “Personally I like to work in as many different media as possible. Sculpture has too long been an affair of marble and bronze. It is too remote, too inaccessible. We must do everything possible to extend its scope and appeal, to insure for it a wider, more popular appeal.” Diederich succeeded in his goal and his fire screens, weathervanes, and lighting are coveted for their charm, elegance, and craftsmanship.

Hungarian-born Hunt Diederich’s fusion of German and American Western cultures is often discussed, yet that reading is too limited for Diederich’s cosmopolitan upbringing. His mother Eleanor was the second child of the Boston artist William Morris Hunt (1829-1879). The young Diederich took advantage of being a part of an artistic family. By 1910 when Diederich made his Paris debut, he had attended Swiss boarding school and Boston’s prestigious Milton Academy, trained with the preeminent French animalier Emmanuel Frémiet, worked as a cowboy in Wyoming, traveled through Spain with his good friend Paul Manship, and gained inspiration from textiles and ceramics he had seen in North Africa. Diederich’s choice of materials were as broad as his travels and with basic materials he elevated functional objects into works of art. Diederich was drawn to traditional folklore narratives, exploring in his silhouettes and fire screens subjects from Don Quixote, the Renaissance, Russian peasants, and African hunters. He was just as interested in new mythic-like symbols of masculinity and found the Spanish toreador as exotic as the Western cowboy or the New York boxer. Travels to Morocco and Mexico to study their rich ceramic traditions resulted in Diederich’s creation of pottery throughout his career; two examples are included in our exhibition.

Hunt Diederich’s formal art training included two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he and fellow student Paul Manship became great friends. The two traveled through Spain in 1908, a creative and competitive summer Manship recalled with fondness. Perhaps this is why Diederich gave Manship the dueling warrior andirons included in our exhibition. The andirons appeared in a well-illustrated article on Diederich in New Country Life in 1917. The caption for the andirons reads: “The hinged tops may be bent down to keep dishes warm over the fire.” An example of how Diederich strove to bring beauty to functional objects, aligning himself with the Arts and Crafts tradition.

Hunt Diederich made his Paris debut at the Salon des Indépendants (the Spring Salon) in 1910 with two cast cement sculptures. His unusual materials were noted by the critic Clément Morro in Revue Moderne. In the current Picasso sculpture exhibition at MoMA, Picasso is given credit for his modernity in the 1930s for elevating the common building material when he cast his Boisgeloup plaster sculptures in cement. Diederich continued to innovate in the Teens with functional objects like brackets in cast iron and lively weathervanes in cut metal. Diederich developed his unique style through silhouettes, a practice he credited to childhood diversions in the German and Swiss tradition. Silhouettes provided a way for Hunt Diederich to focus on movement rather than mass to depict the energy of the animals he loved. Diederich’s mature style elongated forms into an Art Deco aesthetic with crisp lines that translated his silhouette forms into metal weathervanes, chandeliers, and most importantly for fire screens. In our exhibition one can see the fluidity of Diederich’s style between media with Two Greyhounds in the Round, a black paper silhouette accented with a gold outline, and Horse and Hare Trivet with similarly intertwined forms cut out of metal. The shape of the silhouette Strutting Rooster is also seen in Fighting Cocks Charger created at Diederich’s pottery at the Woodstock Arts and Crafts colony Byrdcliffe in 1929.

Diederich was drawn to folk culture and the elemental desire of humans across the ages to enrich their lives with beauty. For this reason, the best of Diederich’s work has a modern simplicity and energy that engages us today.

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Modernism 1913-1950 | Realism of the 1930s and 1940s | Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s | Post-War | Selected Biographies

SALLY MICHEL: RHYTHMS OF LIGHT AND COLOR

Nov 16, 2015 - Feb 13, 2016

Essay | Selected Exhibitions and Museum Collections | New York Times Review

All art by Sally Michel: Ⓒ 2015 The Milton Avery Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Essay by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History, Bard College

Sally Michel lived her life dedicated to making art. She decided on that goal when a teenager, and pursued it with determination and dedication. This is what attracted Milton Avery, seventeen years her senior, when he met her in Gloucester in 1924, and what charmed him to pursue her to New York to woo and marry her. Together they formed an indissoluble unit until the time of his death in 1965. They lived together, had one daughter together, travelled together and painted together. Her vivacious personality complemented his taciturn manner. From extensive interviews with her it is clear that she was convinced that he was a great artist, and that she had no problems having him seen as the front man in their artistic relationship: “I wanted all the spotlight to be on Milton.” (1) She believed that his were the best paintings that could be made at the time, and hers were coextensive with his. They shared the same style of simplified forms and thinly brushed areas of expressive colors, approaching abstraction but always retaining an element of recognizable imagery rooted in the experiences of everyday life. (2)

Within these parameters she achieved a wide range of expression, as can be seen in some of her landscape paintings in this exhibition. In a scene set in Provincetown where an elevated shed sits by the edge of the sea Michel rendered the objects as flat profiles, including the birds on the roof and the echoing sail boats in the water. They become vehicles for a rich play of muted colors, dull greens, tans, browns, subtly ignited by a thin band of blue water. In contrast Spring Forest erupts with bright color as Michel put pale purple bushes in dialogue with yellows and electric blue foliage. In Dense Forest with its blue tree trunks and orange and red earth Michel pushed her arbitrary, intuitive color to extremes that approach Expressionism. The hotly hued scene is divided into a few frontal planes, similar to the three horizontal bands that comprise Spring Landscape and Wooded Shore. The frontal planes of loosely brushed, luminous color remind us that in these years the Averys were close friends with the up-and-coming Abstract Expressionist painters, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. The tripartite structure of Wooded Shore, with its horizontal planes of pale green, blue and yellow tied together by upright meandering lines that represent tree trunks, recalls Rothko’s mythic watercolors from the mid 1940s. Similarly in Birds the combination of the slender band representing the water at the bottom and the vast, bird-filled sky, resembles some of Gottlieb’s pre-Burst abstracted landscapes. But Michel always retained a reference to recognizable nature, which she sketched from almost daily. The figure in Woman by the Lake stands in for the artist, quietly contemplating the beauty of nature that surrounds her. Her pale lavender arm resting at her side is both a complicated abstract shape and a form that clearly expresses the anatomy of the arm and its function. This is one small example of the skill in drawing that inspired Michel’s passion for art when she was just a young child, and that was a central part of her practice as an adult artist. Her Guitar Player is rendered as a series of flattened, simplified forms, her skin an unnatural grey. But her pose, seated, leaning forward, head bowed towards her instrument, conveys her immersion in the music she is making, another example of Michel’s ability to convey real life experience with extremely distilled drawing.

For decades her husband had the freedom to spend his days painting because she was working as a commercial illustrator to support them. Thanks to her drawing talent she had a steady stream of work. She supported her family through her art, unlike many of the other artists’ wives, or for that matter, male artists in her circle. During the Depression when Avery was on the government’s WPA aid to artists program he would get $35 for a painting, which was about what she was making per hour for her commercial work. (3) Early on in her marriage to Avery she had jobs illustrating for Macy’s department store, the magazine Progressive Grocer, a trade publication founded in the 1920s that is still in business, and the Cannon Towel Company, among other clients. Her large, lively Cannon Towel poster, with its bright flat colors and assertive words, bridges the gap between the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and Pop Art.

Her most consistent employment was illustrating the “Parent and Child” column that appeared weekly in the New York Times, a job she held for most of two decades, from around 1940 to 1960. When she retired from this job due to Avery’s failing health, the Times discontinued the column. (4) Michel earned the respect of her fellow artists by having a steady income that was a product of her artistic skills. As she said, “it’s possible to be a commercial artist and yet have a fine arts attitude.” (5) Working in the world of commercial art to support her fine art practice allied her with other American women artists of the period, like Peggy Bacon, Esphyr Slobodkina, Mabel Dwight, and Michel’s good friend, Doris Lee.

Michel’s “Parent and Child” drawings reveal her talent for communicating narratives visually, a skill shunned by the progressive artists who were moving towards pure abstraction. A few examples of her original ink drawings for the 1957 “Parent and Child” column have been preserved and they show her skill at capturing human experiences and conveying everyday dramas with a concise vocabulary. Made for reproduction in the newspaper, her images are exclusively black and white. Like her paintings, she built her images of juxtapositions of flat forms, with no shading and occasional perspectival passages, plus a sophisticated handling of patterns. These limited means relied on her closely observed insights into the behavior of children, and their interactions with adults.

Michel and Avery had one daughter, March, born in 1932, and raising her exposed Michel to the activities of children and parents in the first half of the 20th century. Beyond that she clearly was a perceptive observer of human experiences of all ages, as evidenced by her drawings. In one scene a sympathetic counselor meets with two concerned parents over a report card that displays grades of C, D, and F. (6) A symphony of patterns articulates the image and gives it visual punch, while the body language and concisely rendered facial expressions of the figures communicate the concern of the three protagonists. The father, as in all these illustrations, is a dapper version of Milton Avery, tall and thin, always with a moustache.

Another little known facet of Michel’s art is that she made many portraits of her artist husband, works on paper with a striking range of moods, executed in a broad variety of styles and media. There are probably several hundred of these, and they have rarely been seen. In some he is calm and peaceful, but others are almost Expressionist in their expressive color and distorted physiognomies. In 1949 Avery suffered a major heart attack and suffered from poor health for much of the rest of his life, and the intensity of these works seems to express his struggles as well as her empathy. She was both his caretaker and his companion, and true to Avery/Michel practice the subjects of her art came directly from their shared everyday lives.

In Horse Jumping from around 1955 Michel created a luminous landscape where two horses with riders face each other in profile, the one on the right leaping over a hurdle (Fig. 14). The hurdle, the only perspectival element in the painting, is set against flat bands of land, mountains and sky, each rendered in poetically unrealistic color--witness the pale blues of the ground and the light orange sky. A comparable scene of a girl and a boy on galloping horses appears in a book she illustrated in her role as a commercial artist. (7) Comparing the two reveals the relationship between her art and her illustrations. The couple in the book is also rendered flat, with no modeling; the horses are also seen in profile. But the black outlines surrounding the images make them more graphic, less pure painting. Horse Jumping is typically thinly painted, but Michel also used the physical texture of the paint to expressive effect, with horizontal strokes of the brush visible in the blue ground and impasto patches of white paint for clouds. Compared to the illustration the painting features less anecdote, as broad areas of pure color replace story telling with visual delight. But Michel’s illustration does have narrative: the wide-eyed boy looks admiringly at the spirited girl and issues of gender are raised by the image, as they often were in Michel’s illustrations for the “Parent and Child” column.

The treatment of gender in her hundreds of illustrations raises intriguing questions, complicated by the fact that the drawings were made in dialogue with the texts of the articles. For example “Time Out for Hobbies” features four scenes; a boy plays with toy airplanes, another with a chemistry set, while a girl organizes shells, a scientific activity, and the second girl works printing photographs. But in the essay that accompanies the illustration in the Times it is a boy who practices photography. Michel changed the gender in her illustration as her girls pursue pre-professional activities that have nothing to do with being house wives. (8)

A horse dominates the 1955 painting, Harness Racing, against a typically simplified space, with a richly varied range of greens defining the land, hills and sky. In the center the galloping horse drags a small human figure whose pink shirt contributes a sharp note of contrasting color. The horse itself is a fine demonstration of Michel’s drawing talent: foreshortened, its head turns to its left while its body moves right, all encapsulated in one complex irregular shape, painted an unrealistic pale blue gray that indicates it is art, not illustration. Another horse, in At a Gallop, with its tiny rider perched on it as it races around a dark ring, recalls the haunting Death on a Pale Horse by Albert Pinkham Ryder, an artist greatly admired by the Averys.9 In Michel’s version the glowing colors of the landscape, surmounted by a pale orange sky, set off the dark environment of the racing horse and rider. The loneliness of the solitary figure evokes an existential mood uncharacteristic of the artist, but also hinted at in her Woman by the Lake with its lone woman isolated before nature, reminiscent of 19th century Romantic imagery. These two paintings stray from the sense of well-being and the harmony of everyday existence that characterize the Avery aesthetic, suggesting again that Sally Michel’s artistic achievement is deeper than presently recognized.

1. I thank Deedee Wigmore for asking me to write this essay, Emily Lenz for her capable and encouraging assistance, Jeanette McDonald for her indispensable help with my research, Melissa De Medeiros for her gracious assistance, and March Avery Cavanaugh for her generosity with her Sally Michel materials, as well as Sean A. Cavanaugh. Informative interviews with Sally Michel Avery include: Louis Sheaffer for the Columbia Center for Oral History, December 19 and 26, 1978, January 2 and February 9, 1979; Tom Wolf for the Archives of American Art, February 19, 1982, and Nancy Accord for the Fresno Art Museum, December 2 and 3, 1989. The quote is from the Accord interview, p. 16.

2. As Barbara Haskell described it, “The metamorphosis of representational elements into flat, interlocking shapes of homogenous color formed the basis of his mature work.” Milton Avery, Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harper Row Publishers, New York, 1982, p. 49.

3. Schaeffer interview, p. 9.

4. Accord interview, p. 1.

5. Accord interview, p. 2.

6. The drawing appeared in “Counsel for the Troubled Family,” New York Times Magazine, June 30, 1957, p.167.

7. The drawing appeared in Playtime with Music, lyrics and text by Marion Abeson, music and arrangements by Charity Bailey, illustrations by Sally Michel, Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York, 1952, np.

8. “Time Out for Hobbies” New York Times, June 2, 1957, p. 225.

9. Schaeffer interview, p. 9.

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Modernism 1913-1950 | Realism of the 1930s and 1940s | Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s | Post-War | Selected Biographies