Abstraction & Modernism

The gallery offers abstract painting, beginning at the turn of the 20^th Century and running through the Postwar period, up to the 1980s.  Artists, influenced by the avant garde European works shown at the 1913 Armory Show, developed their own Modernist interpretations to become the mainstay of the Abstraction to emerge as the century wore on.  Those promoted by the important gallerist, Alfred Stieglitz:  Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and those influenced by Cubism, such as Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, and Marguerite Zorach, were some of the earliest artists to explore this new movement. Precisionists like Oscar Bluemner, Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer, George Ault, Louis Lozowick, and Preston Dickinson and the Synchromists Henry Fitch Taylor, Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, soon followed and are also featured.

There is a strong emphasis on the American Abstract Artists of the 1930s-1940s, including works by George L.K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Werner Drewes, Albert Gallatin, Charles Shaw, Balcomb and Gertrude Greene, Burgoyne Diller, and Ilya Bolotowsky.  Equally so are the Transcendental artists from New Mexico such as Ed Garman, Raymond Jonson, and Agnes Pelton, as well as other artists from the area and the West coast including Rebecca James, Henrietta Shore, and Morris Graves.  As the century progressed, the works of these artists gave way to the Abstract Expressionist movement and, later, the Color Field and Minimalist movements.  Artists from this later era include James Brooks, Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, Grace Hartigan, Elaine and Willem De Kooning, and Theodoro Stamos, among others.