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William Baziotes (1912-1963)


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Mirror at Midnight II, 1942 oil on canvas 20 1/8&q...

Mirror at Midnight II, 1942
oil on canvas
20 1/8" x 28 1/8", signed

Figurine and Mirror, 1947 oil on canvas 20 1/8&quo...

Figurine and Mirror, 1947
oil on canvas
20 1/8" x 25",  signed and dated

Toy in the Sun, 1951 oil on  canvas 50 1/8&qu...

Toy in the Sun, 1951
oil on  canvas
50 1/8" x 26"
signed


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Artist Information

“It is the mysterious that I love in my painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my picture to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt." (i)

Born in Pittsburgh, William Baziotes grew up in the Greek community of Reading, Pennsylvania. In 1931, he began working for the Case Glass Company—antiquing glass and running errands—while taking evening sketching classes, where he met poet Byron Vazakas, who soon became a close friend. Vazakas exposed him to French symbolist poetry and the work of Charles Baudelaire. That same year, Baziotes saw an exhibition of Henri Matisse’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1933, he moved to New York City and enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design, where he studied painting with Charles Curran, Ivan Olinsky, Gifford Beal, and Leon Kroll. In 1936, Baziotes left the Academy and participated in his first group exhibition, at the Municipal Art Gallery in New York. He found work with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an art teacher at the Queens Museum, and then joined the easel division of the WPA’s Federal Art Project 1938.

In the years leading up to World War II, New York had become a vital gathering center for European surrealist and modernist artists fleeing the rising tide of fascism. Their presence had a profound impact on many of the artists who encountered their work, and Baziotes was no exception. In the late 1930s, he moved away from figural, academic representation, towards increasingly abstract paintings of biomorphic forms. Since surrealism was an entire art ethos—addressing form, content, and just as importantly, an artist’s entire relationship to art—New York was crucial not just for Baziotes’s style but also his approach to creating images. In 1940, Baziotes met Chilean artist Roberto Matta, who in turn introduced him to Robert Motherwell, who became a close friend. In addition to these artists and the European surrealists in exile, Baziotes befriended Jimmy Ernst, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner. In 1942, Baziotes, his wife (Ethel Copstein Baziotes), Pollock, Krasner, and Motherwell would often meet to play surrealist games and collaborate on poetry. These sessions helped Baziotes open his artwork up to spontaneity and automatism.

In the 1940s, Baziotes gained greater visibility. Marcel Duchamp included Baziotes’s work in his 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, and the following year, his work appeared in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. In 1944, Guggenheim mounted Baziotes’s first solo exhibition, putting him in the company of Motherwell, Pollock, David Hare, and Clyfford Still, all of whom had their inaugural one-man shows at Art of This Century. In his review of the exhibition, Clement Greenberg extolled Baziotes as being “among the six or seven best painters we possess." (ii) Two years later, the Kootz Gallery held his second solo exhibition, and Baziotes joined Kootz’s stable of artists.

Baziotes was a prominent member of the New York School. In addition to his close friendships with abstract expressionist painters and sculptors, he was one of the “Irascibles” made famous in Nina Leen’s 1951 Life photograph, and in 1948, together with Motherwell, Hare, and Mark Rothko, he co-founded the Subjects of the Artist School, an artists group that provided a forum to discuss the issues at stake in contemporary painting. But despite his intimate ties with the world of abstract expressionism, Baziotes’s artwork remained rooted in his own personal take on surrealism: a lyrical, biomorphic abstraction less interested in accessing the unconscious and more concerned with adopting a mysterious and haunted quality, which he imparted through luminous color and eerily foreboding forms.

In the later part of his brief life, Baziotes began to teach extensively at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, New York University, the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) People’s Art Center, and Hunter College. In 1961, Sidney Janis included Baziotes in the Ten American Painters exhibition at his gallery. Two years later, Baziotes died in New York. He has been the subject of several posthumous solo exhibitions including one at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (1965) and most recently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2004-2005).

 


(i)  William Baziotes, It Is 4 (Autumn 1959), 11. Quoted in “William Baziotes,” Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York, http://www.hollistaggart.com/artists/biography/william_baziotes/ (accessed March 2010).

(ii)  Clement Greenberg, Review, The Nation, November 11, 1944. Quoted in Peggy Guggenheim Collection press release, “First European Exhibition of American Abstract Expressionist William Baziotes,” #156 (September, 2004).