"Exploring Black and White: The 1930s through the 1960s" Exhibition
D. Wigmore Fine Art
This event has ended.
"Explorations in Black and White" brings together paintings and constructions in the reductive palette of black and white to show the developments and connections among American abstract artists over the four decades covered in the exhibition
of 34 works of art. Black-and-white was the standard in communication in newspapers, television, and films into the 1960s. Painting was one of the few forms of communication that continuously involved color. Yet the suppression of color in abstract paintings of the 1930s and 1940s occurred as artists saw that a limited palette of black and white could both invigorate their compositions and end traditional elements of painting: the tonal relations within a composition which create modeling and volume and the easy distinction of figure and ground. The pioneer abstractionists discovered that with a black and white palette the compositional elements of shape, line, and texture become the focus, aiding their pursuit of a completely non-objective language. The artists of the 1950s and 1960s similarly turned to this reduced palette to bypass emotional connections with colors and present in simple push-pull compositions their experiments with placement to achieve activity and drama.
[Image: Burgoyne Diller "Second Theme #269" (1934) tempera on masonite 19.5 x 15.5 in.]
Media
Schedule
from October 01, 2009 to December 23, 2009
Artist(s)
Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, Alice Trumbull Mason, Irene Rice Pereira, Rolph Scarlett, Charles Green Shaw, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Sue Fuller, Frederick Hammersley, Charles Hinman, Paul Jenkins, John McLaughlin, David Smith, Tadasky, Anonima Group, Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt, Ed Mieczkowski