Group exhibition Max Ernst Sam Francis Arshile Gorky Adolf Gottlieb Al Held Hans Hofmann Roy Lichtenstein Morris Louis Robert Motherwell Ad Reinhardt
Lawrence Rubin • Greenberg Van Doren • Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of paintings and works on paper from the 1920s through the 90s. The exhibition traces developments in Twentieth Century art ranging from Surrealism to varied traditions in American post-war abstraction.
Featured in the exhibition are works on paper by Max Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and Sam Francis. The earliest work in the exhibition is the 1925 Ernst frottage drawing, L’Arbre, reproduced in the historic 1926 portfolio Histoire Naturelle. Arshile Gorky’s Untitled 1946-48 is a linear, subtly colored composition in pencil and wax crayon. Where as Gorky’s drawing contains the suggestion of figures, the 1952 Sam Francis watercolor on paper, also untitled, is a classic study in pure abstraction. Here cell structures form a suspended conglomerate of dense monochromatic washes. From the 1960s comes Gottlieb’s painterly “imaginary landscape” of 1967 and Floral, an Ernst collage combining oil, ink, and paper.
Paintings by Al Held, Hans Hofmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt form the second component of the exhibition. Reinhardt’s understated, extraordinary Blue and Grey, 1950, provides contrast to the bravura of Hofmann’s 1953 Composition #8. Color field painting of the 1960s is exemplified by the monumental Morris Louis canvas Beta Omicron, 1960-61. The sumptuous, fluid stains of color in Beta Omicron are replaced by crisp, controlled lines in Held’s minimalist North-northwest, an important black and white painting from 1973. The return of painting in a grand gestural manner is marked by Robert Motherwell’s Either/Or (for Kirkergaard), 1991. Finally, it is fitting that this show closes with the Roy Lichtenstein canvas Still Life with Brushstroke, 1996, which plays with the idea of the expressive brushstroke as an icon of the art of the past century.