NYAB Event - Benton Spruance "The Long Night and the New Day"

Benton Spruance "The Long Night and the New Day"

Baruch College/Sidney Mishkin Gallery

This event has ended.

Printmaker, teacher, arts activist, Benton Murdoch Spruance has been all but forgotten in recent decades as the ascendancy of abstract art and post-modernism has eclipsed many once prominent social realists. And Spruance, despite his excursions into metaphorical and Biblical themes, was primarily a social realist, at least until the last decade of his life when his work too became increasingly experimental and abstract.

Born in Philadelphia in 1904, Spruance was primarily a lithographer. Continually experimenting with his chosen medium, he made important advances in color lithography, developing a painstaking method for printing multiple colors with a single stone. A teacher at the Philadelphia Museum School and Beaver College, Pennsylvania, Spruance depicted his home state and his environs throughout his life. His subjects ranged from subway riders to football players, as well as the locales, urban, suburban and rural, of his native Pennsylvania. Perhaps because he rarely strayed far from home, his American Scene prints and paintings have an appealing intimacy despite the fact that his themes were frequently existential in nature.

The current exhibition provides a capsule overview of the artist’s prints, spanning some four decades from the stubbornly enduring The City Tree (1930) to the mythological Ariadne and Dionysius (1965). Spruance died unexpectedly in 1967; at the time, his career as an artist was still evolving.