Harry Holtzman in the Classroom
The Florence Griswold Museum in Old
Lyme, Connecticut, presents Harry Holtzman and American Abstraction, the
first retrospective of abstract painter, teacher, and writer Harry Holtzman
(1912-1987) from October 4, 2013 through January 26, 2014. Drawing
from the holdings of the Holtzman Trust, public collections, and private
lenders, the exhibition brings new attention to the role Holtzman played in
shaping abstract art in America from the 1920s to the 1980s. A close
friend and colleague of Piet Mondrian, Holtzman is best known for helping to
bring the originator of Neoplasticism to America. This exhibition of roughly 60
paintings, sculptures, and drawings features many works not exhibited
since Holtzman's death and highlights the different facets of his role as
perennial stalwart of the New York avant garde.
Harry Holtzman and American Abstraction examines Holtzman's career from the
1920s to the 1980s, charting three distinct periods of abstraction in his work.
The first section of the exhibition, Early Abstractions: 1928-1934,
examines the years when Holtzman was a prolific young artist attempting to find
his artistic voice. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Holtzman enrolled in the Art
Students League in New York in 1928. There, he began experimenting with a
variety of styles - making copies after Cézanne, invoking Regionalist figures
in scenes from a Harlem speakeasy, referencing Cubist collage in ink drawings
over existing text - while reading the freshest ideas of the day. Thriving
under the tutelage of the German abstract painter Hans Hofmann from 1932-1935,
Holtzman developed a commitment to expressiveness and color while beginning to
search for a new direction in his art. He found one in 1934 when
he encountered Piet Mondrian's work. Fascinated by those paintings he
began tentative experiments with gridded, geometric abstraction.
The second section of the
exhibition, Pure Plastic Painting: 1934-1950, explores the
rigorously Neoplastic paintings, drawings, and freestanding sculptures Holtzman
made from 1934 to 1950 under Mondrian's influence. After seeing Mondrian's work
in 1934, Holtzman became convinced of their shared sensibility and raised funds
to travel to Paris to meet him. Holtzman spent four months in Paris studying
under Mondrian, during which time the two artists established what would become
a lifelong friendship. When Holtzman returned to New York in early 1935, his
work was transformed as he adopted a Neoplastic style - replacing the bold
gesture that defined his work under Hofmann with new compositions that used a
grid of black lines on a white ground balanced with primary-colored shapes to
produce purely non-objective paintings.
Works such as Mondrian's Fox
Trot A call attention to the concern that the Dutch artist and
Holtzman shared for establishing a dynamic balance of line and color. Where
Mondrian tipped the square painting on its end to exploit the tension of the
diagonal format, Holtzman contemplated similar issues of space by pushing his
work from two dimensions into three. Moving away from framed canvases that
would hang on a wall, he constructed four-sided columns such as Sculpture (Yale
University Art Gallery) to encourage viewers to confront the interaction of
line and color in space and on a human scale.
This was a vital period for abstraction
in America, and Holtzman was at the forefront of the struggle to establish this
new art. He was a founding member of American Abstract Artists in 1936 - a
group whose members included Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Arshile Gorky, Lee
Krasner, Burgoyne Diller, and George L.K. Morris in its early years. Holtzman helped
arrange Mondrian's immigration to New York in October 1940, as the violence of
World War II spread across Europe. Holtzman also introduced Mondrian to
American boogie woogie records that would inspire Mondrian's most beloved
paintings-ones that pulsated with the energy of life in New York. Upon
Mondrian's death in 1944, Harry Holtzman became both his legal heir -
inheriting the entirety of his personal and artistic estate - as well as his
artistic successor, taking up the mantle and cause of Neoplastic painting in
America.
The final section of the
exhibition, The First Paintings in History: 1950-1987, seeks to
explain a long period from 1950 to 1987 when Holtzman produced very few
finished works, and instead directed his creative energies towards theorizing a
new art that would unify ambitious ideas of language, science, history, and
aesthetics. It was an extremely productive time for his work as a writer,
professor, editor, lecturer, and activist. As interest in Mondrian grew, he
increasingly committed himself to the attendant demands of managing the
Mondrian estate and promoting his legacy. Along with a large collection of
paintings that he would gradually sell over the years, Holtzman became
responsible for Mondrian's collected writings, which he published in the year
before his own death. After years absorbed with securing Mondrian's legacy,
Holtzman returned to the studio, creating a series of towering painted
sculptures that took Neoplastic ideas in a new direction. Excited with the
potential of these works and this new chapter in his artistic life, Holtzman
described the sculptures as the "first paintings in history." The
exhibition will include a number of these works, as well as the artist's
dynamic, over life-size studies.
Holtzman was dedicated to the cause of
the Abstract movement, which before the 1930s was seen as an exclusively
European art movement. He was a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a
group determined to promote abstraction to a reluctant American audience, was
involved with the Eighth Street Artists Club in the 1950s, which served as an
incubator for Abstract Expressionism, and taught for three decades at Brooklyn
College alongside an impressive roster of abstract and conceptual artists. At
every stage of his career, Harry Holtzman pursued new ideas and philosophies
through the language of abstraction. Where traditional histories of
American Modernism treated Neoplastic painting as a passing fad, Holtzman's
work stands testament to its lasting importance to a dedicated circle of
artists who advanced the embrace of Modernism in this country. In this, it is
possible to discern the larger story of abstraction in America.
Connections to Connecticut
Organized by the Museum's curators Amy
Kurtz Lansing and Benjamin Colman, this exhibition is the third presented by
the Florence Griswold Museum that brings a better understanding of modern
artists that lived in the greater Lyme area, an often-overlooked chapter in
Connecticut's rich artistic history. Holtzman was part of a local community
that has been little studied but included significant artists. In 1962 Holtzman
chose a monumental barn along the country roads of Lyme, Connecticut, to
personally convert into a home and studio workspace. He lived and worked there
until his death in 1987.
In
2010, the Museum presented a rediscovery of the work of the Bauhaus-influenced
artist and Yale professor Sewell Sillman, followed by a 2011 retrospective of
the work of photographer Walker Evans, who discovered the artistic community in
Lyme in the 1940s and lived here in the last decades of his life. This ongoing
series of exhibitions helps to fulfill the Museum's institutional goal of
fostering an understanding of American art in all its forms.
