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Montecito – Highlights on View

PUBLISHED IN: Catalogs

Catalog of art on view at Heather James Fine Art Montecito

Artists included in this exhibition

Artists

A favorite artist of Solomon R. Guggenheim, Bauer was a prominent early figure of the non-objective art movement at the beginning of the 20th century. "Larghetto III" is among a series of early works with musically inspired titles. Guggenheim so admired the artist that he purchased more than 300 of Bauer's works, forming the foundation of his collection.
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<br>The opening of Guggenheim's Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939 featured work by Rudolf Bauer and Wassily Kandinsky. Classical music played in the exhibition space.
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<br>German-born Bauer worked closely with the legendary "Der Sturm" gallery in Berlin. He was also imprisoned by the Gestapo for some time because of his subversive art. He emigrated to the United States upon his release in 1939.
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<br>The influence of Bauer's work can be seen in the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky, among many others.

Norman Bluhm's Black and Red (1953), first owned by fellow artist Sam Francis, is an explosive drip painting that characterizes the artist’s style in the late 1950s. Bluhm's process and resulting work epitomizes the category of Abstract Expressionist painters that earned the moniker "action" painters. The energy and passion present in Bluhm’s work was likely fueled by his experience fighting in World War II. The intensity of his paintings from the decade following the war is one reason why Bluhm’s work from the 1950s are some of the most highly sought-after. The top ten prices for the artist at auction are held by paintings from this era.

ALEXANDER CALDER - Aux Clous - gouache and ink on paper - 30 x 21 1/4 in

ALEXANDER CALDER

SALVADOR DALI - Battle Around a Dandelion - jacquard woven tapestry - 42 x 54 1/2 in.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN - Blue Surround - spit bite aquatint & drypoint aquatint on paper - paper: 35 x 26 1/4 in.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Jim Dine was an American Pop artist whose work meditated on objects with childlike appeal to find a universal and nostalgic language. Dine’s robes are among the most recognizable images to have emerged from his long and illustrious career. They were first shown at Sidney Janis gallery in the fall of 1964 – this is one such example. Double Silver Point Robes is a large-scale mixed media assemblage. The work is executed in silverpoint – a technique that utilizes a piece of silver as a drawing instrument over a specially prepared ground by which it oxidizes over a period of months to create a warm brown tone. The two joined canvases feature blocks of wood in place of where the heads should be and a hanging wood element that moves in response to air currents.

SIMON HANTAI - Etude - oil on canvas - 37 x 30 5/8 in.

AUGUSTE HERBIN - Notre Dame, Paris - oil on canvas - 24 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.

Born Robert Clark in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, Robert Indiana is one of the most influential Pop artists of the 20th century. His work has become a pervasive visuality in American culture. Short, bold, and simple, it speaks to viewers through shared cultural touchstones, through word associations, and through its striking relationship to everyday graphics. Indiana first created his iconic “LOVE” imagery as a design for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, and few images since have captivated the public imagination so thoroughly. Shimmering in gold and accented in red, this sculpture takes on any symbolism the viewer can dream. Blending word and image, Indiana recognized language as a functional element of art.

FRIDA KAHLO - House in Harmony - pencil on paper - 13 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.

ALEX KATZ - Sunset: Lake Wesserunsett 4 - screenprint in five colors on American etching paper - 30 x 36 in.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE - Phenakistoscope - brass, wood, vinyl records, four plate lithograph prints on white Arches paper with chine collé atla - 23 1/2 x 12 x 12 in.; on stand: 64 x 12 x 12 in.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

Roy Lichtenstein’s style of Pop art was inspired by comic strips, in which he created images through a combination of mechanical reproduction and hand-drawing. He used iconic images and cultural influences to create striking action images, often with captions and onomatopoeic exclamations, much as one would find in comics. This screenprint is from a group of seven Reflections prints and in each, the image is obscured by color and patterns resembling the reflected light as if behind glass. Inspired by trying to photograph a work by Robert Rauschenberg behind glass, Lichtenstein appropriated images from his past and thus brings the appropriation of Pop art full circle.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN

The Wildenstein Catalogue Raisonné of Monet paintings offers a note on this painting: “During his second stay in Pourville-Varengeville, Monet painted the customs’ officer’s cottage several times and from various angles. This general view shows it overhanging the Gorge du petit Ailly." Monet spent six months in this part of Normandy in 1882, and the cabin in this painting was one of his favorite motifs to revisit. It appears in eighteen paintings from that year, and another dozen from a later trip to the area in 1897. His fixation with this house on the hill later became a habit of working serially – each canvas a singularity registering a unique guise yet set sequentially and in direct relationship to other works within the series. Monet circumambulated and painted the cabin from so many angles that as a group, the paintings are not as clearly recognizable as a series as the celebrated grain-stacks, Rouen cathedral, or poplar series. Still, it is a fixed and iconic element that reappears in many of Monet’s paintings from this period.
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<br>Japanese woodblock prints were a life-long source of inspiration for Monet, and this piece in particular draws upon Hiroshige's "Utsu Mountain, Okabe," c. 1833. This print is part of a series called “The Fifty-three Stations of the T?kaid?,” which documented scenic views from the major road that linked the sh?gun’s capital, Edo, to the imperial one Ky?to. Monet amassed an extensive collection of woodblock prints – many of which are still on view at Giverny.

HENRY MOORE - Standing Figure - bronze and wood - 12 x 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.

Robert Motherwell is admired for his gestural contributions to Abstract Expressionism. From his early period starting in the 1940s until his final works of the 1990s, one can see a distinct stylistic shift into his characteristic Elegy paintings and signature gestural works. Gesture No. 45 demonstrates Motherwell’s intuitive approach to painting influenced by the automatic drawing of the Surrealists. His gestures in this painting are characterized by a suggestion of chance and accident: “Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought,” he said. “Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.”

ROBERT MOTHERWELL

ED RUSCHA - Black Ants - silkscreen printed in colors on wood-veneered paper - 20 1/4 x 27 1/4 in.

HASSEL SMITH - 316 Revisited - acrylic on canvas - 68 x 68 in.

Guenther Uecker and his avant-garde contemporaries experimented with monochromatic color, light, materiality, and repetition. For Uecker, this experimentation manifested in his noteworthy nail-covered canvases. The 1984 piece, Poesie der Destruktion – Poetry of Destruction – presents a tumultuous arrangement on a neat square background. The swarming bed of nails evokes a forceful action with violent connotations. Black and orange swaths of oil paint undulate on the rough surface beneath the exterior of hammered and bent metal. The composition suggests wreckage, yet it lives in the context of artistic creativity, urging the viewer to observe the coexistence of creative and destructive forces.

GUENTHER UECKER

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