“LEGENDS” Exhibition

Marlborough Contemporary

[Image: Sam Francis "New York New York" (1959) acrylic, gouache, and egg tempera on gessoed French paper, 40 x 27 in.© 2021 Sam Francis Foundation, California / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

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1st floor

Marlborough Gallery presents LEGENDS, an exhibition encompassing a group of four artists who played a crucial role in defining the Abstract Expressionist movement of the twentieth century. Presenting the work of Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, and Beverly Pepper, Marlborough is revisiting a legacy which began over sixty years ago during the initial expansion of the gallery to New York.

Abstract Expressionism, at its core, began as a critical enterprise given to both defining and solving problems, based on the assumption that through the application of intellect, hard work, and diligence, the problems of the past could be swept away and replaced by objective, rational humanism. Postwar American Ab-Ex art came with the full endorsement of the U.S. Government, a practice which celebrated the independence of the inventive individual and romanticized willful, often unorthodox creativity. Quickly, new modern works of art became signifiers of a community or company’s modern character, just as the artist became both icon and iconoclast, hero and anti-hero, a courageous creator forging the conditions and terms of the new world.

Into this mix of dynamic social, economic, and cultural conditions, a new generation of artists including Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, and Beverly Pepper garnered the necessary support and resources to work at a physical scale that gave their painting and sculpture a unique architectural presence and authority that would in part define the direction of their work for over a half century.