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PROPERTY OF OAK BROOK BANK

1912-1963
YELLOW MOOD

28 1/4 by 22 in. 71.7 by 55.8 cm.

signed; signed, titled and dated 1946 on the reverse

oil on linen

PROVENANCE

Mr. and Mrs. Morton R. Goldsmith, New York
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Private Collection, California (acquired from the above in 1985)
Christie's, New York, May 13, 1998, Lot 218
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

EXHIBITED

Yonkers, Hudson River Museum, Art in Westchester from Private Collections, September - November 1969, cat. no. 108

NOTE

"It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt."
- - William Baziotes

Yellow Mood was painted during a pivotal period of Willaim Baziotes' life. Peggy Guggenheim had just launched his career in 1944 with his first one-man show at her Art of This Century Gallery. In 1946, the year in which the present work was painted, Baziotes was included in the Whitney Museum's "Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings". In 1947, his painting Dwarf was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and his reputation was sealed.

Baziotes' highly emotional work Yellow Mood evokes a primordial scene with an iconography and technique uniquely his own. A painter of organic abstraction, the short, curved forms -- ambiguous and mysterious -- float within a dense watery world, still and silenced. Removed and unconnected from the viewer, the yellow humanoid figure stands forward in the composition, a blue arc to its left casting a reflective image in a watery pool. This sense of biomorphism was a crucial element of Baziotes' later works, impressions from an earlier Surrealist strain in his ouevre. Baziotes viewed his paintings as a window on the world and a mirror of his mind: "In them, through them, he probed, sought, experienced, lived." (Clifford Still in Exh, Cat., New York, Marlborough Gallery, 1970, p. 5). Speaking of his work, Baziotes has stated: "I want something that evokes mood... I do not consider myself an abstractionist in the sense that I am trying to create beautiful forms that fit together like a puzzle. The things in my painting are intended to strike something that is an emotional involvement -- that has to do with the human personality and all the mysteries of life, not simply colors or abstract balances. To me, it's all reality." (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1965, p. 42). Yellow Mood is a beautiful picture, a strong example from the height of Baziotes' career that captures the powerful emotions so central to the artist's thinking and way of life.