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拍品專文
Selected for inclusion in the William Baziotes Catalogue Raisonné, in preparation by Michael Preble.
“It is the mysterious that I love in my painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my picture to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt." William Baziotes, quoted in It Is 4 (Autumn 1959), p. 11.
Executed at the critical genesis of Baziotes’s mature style in 1947, Night Landscape is a quintessential example of the artist’s characteristic aqueous fields of subdued color populated by semi-translucent, biomorphic forms. Like spores or microbes, the ambiguous, floating symbols become glyphs to be deciphered, as if they were ancient markings from past cultures. Painted the same year as Cyclops, the artist’s most lauded composition in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Night Landscape shares the poetic combination of the cerebral and the whimsical typical of Baziotes’s distinguishing aesthetic during this pivotal period.
To produce his otherworldly canvases, Baziotes painted intuitively. He allowed the images to emerge slowly and hauntingly from the canvas, like phantoms from the darkness. This method of automatism as well as his use of thinned oil paint and biomorphic forms was inspired by his connections to the Surrealist émigrés living in New York in the 1940s. Baziotes shared a close relationship with Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta, and often was included in European Surrealist group exhibitions, including the “First Papers of Surrealism” in 1942.
Baziotes’ understanding of these European movements was extremely personal, combined with an entirely innovative treatment of form and surface. As an artist of Greek descent, Baziotes often incorporated forms that appeared in the ancient sculpture he owned, as well as surreal variations seen in specimens from the natural sciences. Despite these sources, the artist’s forms were always abstracted and evocative, never explicit. This ambiguity reflects both the Symbolist concept of “correspondences,” or forms that suggest multiple references, as well as the Abstract Expressionist interest in the mythic and the psychoanalytical. Imbued with an inherent spiritualism, his poetic yet indefinite iconography in Night Landscape defies a singular interpretation, encouraging the viewer to conjure personal connections.
“It is the mysterious that I love in my painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my picture to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt." William Baziotes, quoted in It Is 4 (Autumn 1959), p. 11.
Executed at the critical genesis of Baziotes’s mature style in 1947, Night Landscape is a quintessential example of the artist’s characteristic aqueous fields of subdued color populated by semi-translucent, biomorphic forms. Like spores or microbes, the ambiguous, floating symbols become glyphs to be deciphered, as if they were ancient markings from past cultures. Painted the same year as Cyclops, the artist’s most lauded composition in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Night Landscape shares the poetic combination of the cerebral and the whimsical typical of Baziotes’s distinguishing aesthetic during this pivotal period.
To produce his otherworldly canvases, Baziotes painted intuitively. He allowed the images to emerge slowly and hauntingly from the canvas, like phantoms from the darkness. This method of automatism as well as his use of thinned oil paint and biomorphic forms was inspired by his connections to the Surrealist émigrés living in New York in the 1940s. Baziotes shared a close relationship with Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta, and often was included in European Surrealist group exhibitions, including the “First Papers of Surrealism” in 1942.
Baziotes’ understanding of these European movements was extremely personal, combined with an entirely innovative treatment of form and surface. As an artist of Greek descent, Baziotes often incorporated forms that appeared in the ancient sculpture he owned, as well as surreal variations seen in specimens from the natural sciences. Despite these sources, the artist’s forms were always abstracted and evocative, never explicit. This ambiguity reflects both the Symbolist concept of “correspondences,” or forms that suggest multiple references, as well as the Abstract Expressionist interest in the mythic and the psychoanalytical. Imbued with an inherent spiritualism, his poetic yet indefinite iconography in Night Landscape defies a singular interpretation, encouraging the viewer to conjure personal connections.