EDWARD AVEDISIAN REVERBERATIONS
C OV E R: U N T I T L E D (D E TA I L ), C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 6 6 X 9 8 I N .
EDWARD AVEDISIAN REVERBERATIONS SEPT 10 - OCT 10, 2020
VIEW THE ENTIRE EXHIBITION ONLINE AT WWW.BERRYCAMPBELL.COM
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n 1962, Edward Avedisian was using properties of paint absorbency in his canvases to create planes that on the surface were also part of the canvas itself. At the time, a reviewer for Arts described him as “a talented, serious, hip painter.”1 By December 1963, when he had his first show at Elkon Gallery, Brian O’Dougherty stated in the New York Times that his work had changed drastically “for the better.” O’Dougherty commented that Avedisian was now painting in the “eye-splitting manner pioneered by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.” He noted that Avedisian’s new work consisted of circular target shapes set against yellow or dark backgrounds. From these, O’Dougherty observed, “the encapsulated targets woo the eye . . . in a sort of shooting match of afterimages.” He saw Avedisian as part of a definite school, noting that “the time was ripe for a group show intelligently examining . . . a new and exciting trend.”2 About this time, Avedisian had begun using Liquitex in his paintings. Invented in 1955, Liquitex—named for “liquid” and “texture” together—was the first commercial water-based artists’ acrylic paint. In 1963, its paints were available for the first time in a thicker consistency, a factor that is evident in the clean lines and defined color areas in Avedisian’s images. Consistent with Color Field painting, he used geometric shapes to emphasize color and form over drawing and subject matter. His images at the time consisted of concentric circular shapes (orbs or targets) against solid-colored fields. Some were constrained by outlines and others were unbounded. These works are similar to the Core paintings of Jules Olitski, but Avedisian’s smaller, more kinetic targets have a stronger retinal effect, as if to move into different positions when viewers refocus. Two examples of this are
Normal Love #1, 1963 (plate 1) and The Whole World Has Gone Surfing (fig. 1), which was given to the Museum of Modern Art by Andy Warhol in 1973. Avedisian’s 1963 show at Elkon overlapped with the opening of the Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings. Included were works by 145 artists that were wide-ranging, but as the critic John Canaday pointed out, in any Whitney Annual “the news lies in the first timers.” Avedisian and Frank Stella were the first of these named by Canaday, as artists who he noted were, nonetheless, not “fresh from kindergarten.” Stuart Preston commented in the New York Times that although fanciful figures and interiors done in an abstract expressionist style looked “tame next to the sensation seeking ‘combines’ of Robert Rauschenberg, it should be obvious to all that [the] paintings by Larry Poons, Edward Avedisian, Neil Williams, and Charles Hinman, and others, shine out of the throng for their own intrinsic virtues.”3 Avedisian’s Untitled painting in Liquitex (fig. 2) was purchased from the show by the prominent art collector Richard Brown Baker (1912– 2002), whose holdings of postwar art included groundbreaking works by leading Abstract Expressionists.4 Avedisian’s second show at Elkon, held in January 1965, consisted of works with small flat circles crossed by diagonal or vertical stripes in open surfaces, creating new patterns of movement through color contrasts and relationships of figure and ground. Noting that the show was Avedisian’s “strongest and most definite” to date, a critic stated in Arts that he had “taken pains to place his circular forms with deliberate anonymity so that the circles have the effect of stars thrown out at random in a sky.”5 That year, O’Dougherty’s recognition that an emerging
school needed to be examined was realized when the Museum of Modern Art opened Op Art: The Responsive Eye in February 1965. The show, which traveled to St. Louis, Seattle, Pasadena, and Baltimore, introduced Op Art to American audiences. In the show’s press release, its curator William C. Seitz described the paintings and constructions by the 99 artists included as works that existed “less as objects to be examined than as generators of perceptual response in the eye and mind of the viewer.”6 Critic John Canaday observed that the exhibition presented art that left behind the “sloppiness” that had previously marked the avant-garde in favor of “art forms that demand technical perfection as an integral part of expression.”7 In the exhibition, Avedisian’s untitled 55-inch square canvas was lent by the noted art collector John G. Powers.8 The work fit into the show’s category of “Optical Paintings,” in which line, shape, and color were all deemed to be dependent on relative relations and proportions, determined by artists through experimentation and perceptual experience, rather than established color theory, an idea originated by Josef Albers in his series, Homage to the Square (begun in 1950).9 In 1965, a natural progression occurred in Avedisian’s art, as his striped circles grew large and seemed no longer to respect the confinement of the pictorial space. It was as if the artist had become smaller, making the circles gain in size, thus implying the broader space they once inhabited. Cut off by the edges of the works, the partial circles, with clean but soft edges, are still circles to the viewer’s eye and perceptually seem to be moving beyond the canvas, and even jumping from one canvas to another. The animate qualities of the large striped circles led a critic for Arts Magazine—reviewing Avedi-
sian’s 1966 exhibition at Elkon—to state that one looked like “a giant beach ball on a holiday binge.” The critic commented: “Placement of the shape, direction of stripes and dare-all color combinations give a definite ‘bound’ and ‘rebound’ rhythm to the party.”10 These works, featured in the present exhibition, were the culmination of Avedisian’s art in the Color Field mode. Through 1967, he expanded the theme in several directions. In some works, solid-colored fields become shapes, but even in such a work (Untitled, plate 2), the curved line crossing the canvas lets the viewer complete
FI G.1. T H E W H OL E WOR L D H A S G ON E SUR FI N G , 1963, L I QU I T E X O N C A N VA S, 6 8⅛ X 6 8⅛ I N. CO L L EC T I O N O F T H E M USEU M O F M O D E R N A R T. G I F T O F A N DY WA R H O L , 1973.
the rest of the circle. In many of the paintings, the viewer senses the velocity of the circle from its placement and the alignment of the stripes within it (Untitled, plate 3). In a few works, the full circle reappears, making it seem that the canvas is more distant in the actual space, even though this is not the case (Untitled, plate 4). Figurative allusions surface in works in which parts of circles fill spaces (Untitled, plate 5), the curves and stripes evoking the body and clothing, as if a giant human could grow from the painting. Throughout, the work exhibits a sophisticated sense of humor, letting viewers in on the joke, while also defying expectations as to the limits and scale of a given painting. When Avedisian’s May 1967 exhibition opened at Elkon, he was the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, given to individuals, after a rigorous selection process, “who had already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”11 Reviewing the Elkon show, a critic for Artnews commented on Avedisian’s “blow-up of details of his earlier paintings,” commenting that they “looked like reconnaissance photographs of a color-field planet taken from a . . . satellite.”12 By 1968, while a Guggenheim fellow, Avedisian went in an entirely new direction, adopting a dynamic painting method using irregular swaths of color bled into his canvas surfaces. A critic for Artnews stated that he had “gone to Action work.”13 He did not return to his earlier mode, and when a few of his disk paintings were featured with six other Color Field artists in the aforementioned 1971–72 exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the trajectory of his career was given acknowledgment. The catalogue stated that the disks in Avedisian’s 1965 paintings, such
as a large painting in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, “float like papier-colle forms in their atmospheric fields, while their striped interiors generate lateral movement through the angles they form with the border of the canvas.” By contrast, in his recent works, Avedisian had “picked up from the lessons of Hans Hofmann, where his earliest work in the exhibition . . . had left them.”14 The blown up orbs of 1965–66 mark a pivotal point in Avedisian’s career, which he seems to acknowledge in their buoyancy and exuberance. —Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.
1
N.E., “Edward Avedisian,” Arts 60 (January 1962), p. 13.
2
B[rian] O’D[ougherty], “This Week Around the Galleries,” New York Times, December 15, 1963, p. 138.
3
Stuart Preston, “The Sensation Seekers,” New York Times, June 27, 1965, p. X21.
4
On Baker’s collecting activities, see Jennifer Farrell, Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Baker bequeathed the majority of his collection to the Yale University Art Gallery. However, Baker’s Avedisian painting was purchased in 2008 by the Yale University Art Gallery. See “Acquisitions, July 1, 2007–June 30, 2008,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2008), p. 199.
5
V.D., “Edward Avedisian,” Artnews 63 (January 1965), p. 17.
6
“The Responsive Eye,” press release, February 1965. http://www.moma. org/pdfs/docs/press_archives/3439/releases/MOMA_1965_0015_14. pdf?2010, retrieved August 14, 2020.
7
John Canaday, “The Responsive Eye: Three Cheers and High Hopes,” New York Times, February 28, 1965, p. X19.
8
In the early 1970s, John G. Powers (d. 1999), former president of Prentice-Hall Publishing Company, and his Japanese-born wife, Kimiko, moved to Carbondale, Colorado, where their immense Pop Art collection is now housed in the Powers Art Center, which opened in 2014.
9
William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965), pp. 18–19.
10
R.S., “Edward Avedisian,” Arts 43 (March 1966), p. 60.
11
“About the Fellowship,” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,” https://www.gf.org/about/fellowship/, accessed August 14, 2020.
12
S.B., “Edward Avedisian,” Artnews (May 1967), p. 10.
13
“Edward Avedisian,” Artnews (December 1968), p. 14.
14
Wood, p. 12.
P L AT E 1. N O R M A L L OV E #1 , 19 6 3, L I Q U I T E X O N C A N VA S, 67 ¼ X 67 ½ I N.
P L AT E 2 . U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 4 8 X 8 8 I N .
P L AT E 3. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 7 8 X 7 8 I N .
P L AT E 4. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 7 8 X 7 8 I N .
“I met him at the bar at Max’s Kansas City around 1966. We were surrounded by many of the greatest painters of this Renaissance. Avedisian was scary smart. It was like a high form of entertainment to listen to his mind work; sorta like being with Bob Rauschenberg or de Kooning. God, this guy could paint! And each painting was a new experiment! Enviable stuff. No wonder people are revisiting his work. I guess as an artist, the best compliment I could give Avedisian is that I wish I had one of his paintings.” —Forrest Myers, 2020
P L AT E 5. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 6 8 X 101¼ I N.
P L AT E 6. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 6 6 X 9 8 I N .
P L AT E 7. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 65 X 128 I N.
P L AT E 8. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 5 4¼ X 5 4 I N .
ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL GALLERY Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision. Both art dealers have developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York’s Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space. Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell’s exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, “... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction.” In addition to Perle Fine, Judith Godwin and Yvonne Thomas, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists’ careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell’s exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer’s Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.” Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made. Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Art District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011. For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.
P L AT E 9. U N T I T L E D , C . 19 6 5, AC R Y L I C O N C A N VA S, 7 9 X 7 9 I N .
5 3 0 W E S T 24 T H S T R E E T N E W Y O R K , N Y 1 0 0 11 I N F O @ B E R R Y C A M P B E L L .C O M T E L 2 12 .9 24. 2 17 8 V I E W T H E E N T I R E E X H I B I T I O N O N L I N E AT W W W. B E R R Y C A M P B E L L .C O M