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Artist or Maker: William Baziotes (1912-1963)
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Provenance: Kootz Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1948
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Exhibited: New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, December 1947-January 1948.
Baltimore Museum of Art, American Painting Interests Baltimore Collectors, September-October 1948.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force and American Art, September-October 1949.
Gallery of Toronto, Contemporary Painting from the United States, Great Britain and France Exhibition, November-December 1949.
Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, The Magical Worlds of Redon, Klee, Baziotes, January-February 1957.
New York, Sidney Janis Gallery, December 1957-January 1958.
Paris, Galerie de France, American Vanguard Art for Paris Exhibition, February, 1958.
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition, January-February 1965, no. 4.
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Literature: Possibilities I, Winter 1947-1948, p. 5 (illustrated).
Tiger's Eye, October 1948, p. 53 (illustrated).
"Toward a Definition of Abstract Expressionism," Baltimore Museum of Art News, Vol. 22, February 1959, pp. 1-13 (illustrated).
S. Hunter, American Art of the Twentieth Century, New York, 1973, p. 190, no. 345 (illustrated).
The Selma & Israel Rosen Collection, New York, n.d. (illustrated).
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF SELMA AND ISRAEL ROSEN
In 1940, Baziotes met Matta and began to experiment with Surrealist automatism. Baziotes' contacts with Surrealism at this time are critical to his subsequent development. In 1942 he exhibited in André Breton's "First Papers of Surrealism" at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion and, in 1944, held his first one-man exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art of This Century," which was a junction of expatriate European Surrealists and younger American artists like Motherwell and Pollock.
The evolution of Surrealist automatic techniques in America took various forms but fundamentally evidenced is a change from small graphic to full-scale painterly procedures. "The conversion of Surrealist techniques in the direction of organically unified imagery and, in Baziotes' case, in the direction of 'beautiful painting,' is characteristic of American art in the 40s. The meager or mechanical techniques of Surrealist painting were replaced by sensuously rich and pictorially consistent forms" (L. Alloway, William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1965).
Baziotes' surfaces are atmospheric landscapes where intentionally free-form shapes become creaturely images. These cryptic, fantastic, biomorphic forms emerge from the atmospheric depths and, even as they remain self-contained, bounded by exquisitely nuanced, barely visible lines, they seem to grow before our eyes. Biomorphic forms, like the ones seen here in Night Landscape, enabled Baziotes to invent freely while avoiding non-objectivity. Their allusive, yet non-descriptive forms have a strong potential for erotic, pathetic, or even aggressive meanings. "The art of Baziotes certainly rests on a comparable sense of the explosion of life processes" (Ibid).
Baziotes' work from this period dispels any notion that the intellectually innovative and unconsciously revelatory must be divorced from the beautiful and painterly, for here we have a work that is thoroughly modern and undeniably beautiful. Night Landscape achieves what most painting aspires to.
