For the first half of her life this prodigy played the violin with several Philharmonic Orchestras. In the second half she became completely immersed in the freedom of painting — often through the night. Now she ranks as top tier among self-taught artists.
Anonymous Anomaly: This teenage artist risked it all in World War II as a teenage B-24 machine gunner — and miraculously survived crashing behind enemy lines. Returning home, he got his master’s — and broke from the norm again, founding an avant colony with an artist-run gallery and...
The extraordinary discovery of this hidden gem in the history of American Art and will soon be revealed. For more than 70 years, in a studio surrounded by 8,000 art books, the singular focus of this master’s unparalleled approach to figurative expressionism was The Passion.
Simatos’ work is a time capsule of celebrities, royalty, and the haute bourgeoisie of an era spanning from the 1920s to the 1970s. But the big surprise is that he was also an itinerant trans-Caribbean painter who met many of his sitters on a luxury cruise ship line as staff artist. That makes...
Iria was the first Finnish woman pioneer of abstract painting in America. Prolific but reclusive, her bold abstract paintings are a uniquely vibrant cultural fusion of Finland and America. Her loft in SoHo became a virtual time capsule preserving five decades of paintings.
An epiphany led him to discard his career, become wholly dedicated to painting, and succeed in creating a new technique and style of pure pouring. Some paintings drive toward the sublime as sacred shafts of light. Others emit the hallucinatory energy of his inner mind.
During the 1980s he invented sculpture-as-graffiti and was a driving force in the Rivington School. He bolted his welded sculptures to the city’s signposts — calling them “outstallations.” The title of one says it all: “I’m No Gallery Whore.” His recent paintings — AbEx Graffiti —...
This master of the energy of tension created wrappings that are unique in American art — from the famous Washington Square Arch to his extensive body of paintings.
He was only 22 when he became an expatriate, and found the unspoiled island of Paros in the middle of the Aegean Sea. There he developed an extraordinary approach to painting, fragmenting space as he captured his environment with a 360° view, as if he were painting in the 4th dimension.
This Italian-American is a master among contemporary expressionists. His bravura brushwork comes from an authentic passion and reveals the very rare skill and vision to control color and light.
A master of lyrical expressionist landscape painting, Bud Holman captured the energy of the mountains and high desert of the Southwest. His canvases express, in a myriad of colors applied with bravura brushwork, the spirit of lands sacred to Native American tribes. His approach was truly unique in...
Thanks to his eponymous museum, this prolific expressionist master is finally emerging as one of the most important artists in the South during the 20th century. The discovery of his diverse and complex body of work in every medium presents a paragon from whom contemporary artists may grasp how to...
Finally revealed is this extraordinary double life: Walk into any drugstore and you’ll see his commercial packaging designs that have become iconic in American culture. But for more than 60 years he was also pushing the boundaries of abstract expressionist painting.
In 1960 Beverly Brodsky studied under Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College. On the first day she was simply told to paint a large canvas. Reinhardt returned a few hours later, paused by her easel and asked, “Who taught you how to paint?” Before she could find a reply Reinhardt answered his own...
Jimmy Buffet wrote lyrics with him in mind. Basquiat painted his portrait. He built a 70-foot schooner and left the touch of solid earth for a record 1,152 days without touching shore, without resupply of food or water, and without fuel. This shaman created a large body of extraordinary abstract...
McNease was a self-proclaimed “feral artist” of the bayou — a true self-taught Outsider who lived alone at the edge of Honey Island Swamp, Louisiana. Early on he gained serious critical recognition for his abstract natural photography. He then invented an entirely new technique of pigment...
The story of Stewart Hitch ranks as one of the most tragic in our contemporary art history. He was charismatic as James Dean, and as hard a drinker as Jackson Pollock. He developed a signature abstract style but most of his art disappeared.
“Were I to have more faith in and familiarity with the Eternal Muses, might I not find that there is an intergalactic aesthetic reality to be espoused? Not the latest artist arrival on the current of popularity & esteem, but the spaceman of all time. Great comfort would be in...
Imagine being inspired at a subway station. Here is an artist who creates urban environments as much as he does sculpture and paintings — in the shadow of the Acropolis. He continues to be inspired by that brilliant natural merger of art and science that the Ancient Greeks applied to their art....
Beginning in the mid 1980s, and until his tragic death in 1991, the doors to the pantheon of significant contemporary artists were open to Joseph Amar [1954-2001]. Critically acclaimed, his works were exhibited internationally and were collected by celebrities and major museums. A drunk driver...
Here is a most intriguing chapter in the history of painting in the Southwest. Rane’s large body of paintings form a cosmic codex with stylized female figures and pictographs referring to ancient myth.
Before he disappeared he was on the perfect path: studying under Josef Albers at Yale; a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1966; internationally, several museums of modern art showed his paintings. But in his spiritual exploration he became reclusive and shunned galleries. In his...
Rare is the artist who could claim to have dived as deep into the unconscious and survived the journey — bringing back images of intense imagination and technical brilliance. As proof, this recluse kept his life’s works buried in a dilapidated shack in the hills of Eugene, Oregon. The...
Just after World War II, a raucous group of artists in New York City known as the “The Irascibles” wrested away from Paris the title of capitol of the art world. Many art historians have written about those first ten years of Abstract Expressionism and the creative group who have been...
This early AbEx painter suffered three tragedies that resulted in a depression that made him become agoraphobic. Even the entreaties of Leo Castelli failed to draw out the prolific recluse. He wrote that his paintings opened a “back door” to aesthetic secrets held in the universe.
This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told.
This Figurative Expressionist lived the Bay Area for two decades before settling in Greenwich Village in 1957. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar with his AbEx friends and exhibited at several New York galleries. He even taught at MoMA but soon became a reclusive painter living what he called “a...
Yes, a street artist can become a master. “The Wizard of Brooklyn” was a completely self-taught artist who was also a holistic healer at one of the world’s largest mental hospitals. Psychoanalysts said he fit the profile of a classic reclusive hoarder. Bartnikowski found it...
During the period between the two World Wars, Europe was left staggering. Empires had disappeared. New borders were drawn. And the ensuing deep economic recession seemed a permanent quagmire. Little wonder that within this environment artists and writers would explore themes that expressed...
Geoffrey Moss has led double lives ever since he earned his MFA in the 1950s at Yale under Josef Albers. Twice he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his political drawings — yet, he has also remained a prolific abstract painter.
That Feldsott's supercharged paintings bring something new, brash, vital and exciting into the generally self-conscious, sometimes even precious realm of contemporary American art should not surprise us. They ask us, urgently, to reconsider the role of the metaphysical in our lives and art in...
Although O’Keefe’s abstractions are at first glance similar with those of his contemporary, Gerhard Richter, they are in reality quite different. Richter's abstractions are produced by “pulling the paint in emotionless paths over the canvas,” with the purpose of being...
Richard Timperio is a rarity because while he is painter of compelling imagery he is also a pioneering gallerist. In the late 1970s he was at the forefront of a small group of artists who left Manhattan to settle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By the mid 1990s he had created an alternative exhibition...
Starting in 1963, Kokoschka inspired this protegé, Wayne Ensrud, to dig deeper than other young contemporary artists, most of whom had been misled into thinking that a focus of massive energy and emotion was enough to become a great painter. Instead, his epiphany was that painting is a metaphysical...
This master of the painted collage obsessively changes his compositions, as revealed by layers of canvas fragments and a variety of materials. The resulting lyrical expressionist shorescapes are musical in their evocation of particular moods and weather.
In 2013, ABC’s “Good Morning America” featured the Pinajian Discovery of thousands of paintings rescued from a Dumpster as “the unlikely discovery that has rocked the art world.” Here’s the compelling story of how a master’s life and works were nearly lost forever.
His images of politics, the environment, and sex are as explosive now as they were 60 years ago. Not only did he invent a new printing medium but a New York Times critic called him “the world’s greatest living carver of wood; there’s not even anyone close.”
Pessemier is a Modern Impressionist living in Paris. He paints en plein air at the same locations where the great Impressionists set up their easels — not only around Paris but all over France. He has exhibited extensively in Paris since the 1990s, including eight shows at the famous Le...
In the history of American landscape painting, the visionary artists who pursued the paths of fantasy and mysticism are few. Here are poetic landscapes, part real, part fantasy — and always mystical.
Iraqi Phoenix
Qasim Sabti is the founder of a group of Iraqi artists called “The Iraqi Phoenix,” owing not only to their own survival during their country’s war and upheaval but to their creative vision that persisted. Among the most important of Sabti’s artworks are...
