Rose Fried and George Wittenborn

In 1953 Rose Fried exhibited eight of Georges Vantongerloo’s paintings, six of his sculptures, and a selection of “color sketches, studies, and photographs” in her Manhattan gallery, in a show simply titled Georges Vantongerloo—Paintings, Sculpture. Vantongerloo was not present at the opening. Although many of his works crossed the Atlantic during his lifetime, he unfortunately never made it to the United States himself.

The critic Stuart Preston reviewed the show for The New York Times38 and noted how Vantongerloo had gone further than even Mondrian—an assessment, incidentally, that was emphatically shared by Bill.

At Bill’s suggestion,39 the New York publisher George Wittenborn (a personal friend of Bill) published the book Vantongerloo: Paintings Sculptures Reflections in 1948. It appeared in the series Problems of Contemporary Art. Bill wrote the introduction to it.

In the same year that the first book on Vantongerloo appeared in English, Wittenborn wrote to Vantongerloo to inform him that the Rose Fried Gallery wished to acquire some of his works.40

In September 1951, Rose Fried asked Vantongerloo for Bill’s address; Vantongerloo gladly obliged in a letter written that October. Within a few months, in January 1952, Fried put one of Bill’s paintings on view for the first time in her gallery (the 1946 work 77 Black Squares), in a group show called Coincidences. Besides Bill’s painting, the exhibition featured artwork by Fritz Glarner, Georges Vantongerloo, Robert Delaunay, Jean Arp, and Kazimir Malevich.