Half Century
Debra Force Fine Art presents a new exhibition that examines 50 years of American art
Debra Force Fine Art presents a new exhibition that examines 50 years of American art
In 1946, abstract painter Rolph Scarlett painted Red Form, a 52-by62-inch work that featured a bold symphony of shapes arranged over a gloomy field of shadow.the work would soon go to the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “permanent” turned out not to be the case, though, when the work was
deaccessioned from the museum and ended up in a private collection in the 1970s, where it would stay for more than four decades.
The work is now the centerpiece of a new exhibition, Fiftyyears of American Art, at Debra Force Fine Art in New York.the show will present 35 works by key figures of 20th-century American
art, artists such as George Copeland Ault, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Jacob Lawrence and Grace Hartigan, whose black-and-white drawings will be featured prominently. For gallery director Bethany Dobson, the show will be anchored by Scarlett’s Red Form and Hartigan’s drawings.
“We love getting these amazing works in the gallery, especially when they haven’t been seen in awhile,” she says. “For Red Form, it’s a big painting and really powerful in person. It’s fun, too. Scarlett was one of the early artists who painted abstractly, and he was very influenced by Kandinsky and Hilla von Rebay, who was starting the Museum of Non-objective Painting at the time, which would go on to become the Guggenheim…paintings of this size and from this period are rare. He had a long life so he was quite prolific—he also did jewelry designs—and you do see his work at auction, but nothing quite like this. It’s a special piece.” Elsewhere in the show will be the 1937 oil Desert Towers by Ault, who was mostly known as a precisionist, though this work has elements of surrealism as a tower emerges from a bleak desert landscape that spans out far and wide in front of a snow-capped mountain range. “it’s an imaginative theme and is quite wonderful as well. Unlike other artists, he didn’t go to the Southwest and didn’t take trips to Taos or Santa Fe. this work was done in Woodstock, New York, and while he was there he was feeling very isolated
after spending so much time in New York City. In response to that he did a whole group of these desert landscapes. Some of them are nocturnal scenes, and they are these very stark, isolated compositions with jagged rocks or really interesting light,” Dobson says. “Ault had a challenging personal life. He was very ill as a child, and when he was very young he was in Europe with his family. when he came to the state, shortly afterward, his mother died in a mental institution, one of his brothers committed suicide. He was poverty stricken, which is why he moved from New York City to Woodstock. Later his father died of cancer, and then two of his other brothers committed suicide after they realized their father left them with no money. there was a lot of tragedy in his life.”
Other works in the show include an oil study by Davis, avery’s Pink Island, White Waves, and Larry Rivers’ Clarice with a Blue Eye:the Artist’s Wife, which helped inform one of his greatest works, Parts of the Face: French Vocabulary Lesson, which is now part of the Tate Modern’s collection.
The title of the show, Fifty Years of American Art, roughly refers to an exciting period that begins in the
1930s and ends in the 1980s. “the show is an interesting look at what was happening in American art during this period. In the 1950s, for example, you have abstract expressionist works that are very dramatic, and then works by Milton Avery that are bright and colorful and there are certainly abstract elements to it, but they are recognizable as seascapes and landscapes,” Dobson says. “at the same time you have Louis Guglielmi. His works from the 1950s are a combination of modernism and surrealism and using really bright color.the show tells a broader story about what artists were doing in certain decades, whether it was early abstraction in the 1930s or abstract expressionism in the 1950s, or how those artists explored art outside of their respective movements—these weren’t just one-note decades.” Fiftyyears of American Art continues at Debra Force Fine Art through October 25.