Reception: August 31, 5:30-7:30
Santa Fe, NM – After a distinguished career that now spans more than 50 years, Robert Natkin is widely regarded as one of the legendary Color Abstractionists of American Modernism. An important retrospective exhibition of his work, titled Color Transcendence, will open on August 31, 2007, at LewAllen Contemporary in Santa Fe. It includes some of the artist’s earliest works from the 1950s and spans every major period in his breathtaking oeuvre. A full-color catalogue with essay by art historian Kathryn M. Davis will accompany the survey.
Natkin is undoubtedly one of the premier abstract painters in America today. He is credited for having taken on and evolved color mastery process from the “soak-stain” Post-Painterly Abstractionists, inventing a wide range of original techniques involving sponging, staining, stenciling and soaking to achieve signature painterly effects. In his book Art Today, the noted critic and art historian Edward Lucie-Smith wrote that “As exercises in painterly virtuosity [his paintings] are unsurpassed.” Lucie-Smith described Natkin’s paintings as “the ultimate development” in color abstraction and said “sumptuous color orchestration can probably be taken no further.”
Natkin’s lively color abstractions are unabashedly pleasurable, entertaining and beautiful. Like other color field artists and contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, he developed his own unique technical vocabulary to produce jazzy surfaces and color harmonies capable of provoking memorable and joyful sensations in the viewer’s eye. Going beyond mere surface aesthetics, his paintings pull viewers into an intimate connection that feels transcendent. Theodore F. Wolff, in The Many Masks of Modern Art, described his compositions as “subtle evocations of the gentler, more ineffable levels and dimensions of our physical and spiritual universe” and summed up their impact by calling the artist “a visual poet whose apparently abstract images actually exist to enchant us with intimations and evocations of things we can sense but never quite see.”
Throughout his career, Natkin has set his aesthetic compass consistently and firmly in the direction of traditional painterly concerns for color, form and composition, never straying toward the distant shoals of "new” art's focus on process and concept. Resolutely a painter, he has been consummately devoted to the non-representational and its power to foster a more intense life of the spirit through profound emotional experiences of form and color. His style has evolved through series of paintings that are open-ended in the sense that he frequently revisits the series in his later work.
He has named as influences American jazz vocalists Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, as well as Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Abstract Expressionist painters. Reviewers have compared him favorably to Paul Klee; and there is no doubt that, like Klee, he has throughout his career felt the “call of color.” But also, like Klee, Natkin has developed his own kind of “pattern language,” a vocabulary filled with biomorphic forms and vaguely geometric shapes that define and structure the painting plane in a kind of lyric extemporanity which is fully as important as his extraordinary mastery of color in communicating profoundly moving sensations.
Natkin was born in Chicago in 1930 and was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1948 to 1952. He encountered Abstract Expressionism through an article on Jackson Pollock in a 1949 issue of Life magazine. In the early 1950s he was deeply affected by Willem de Kooning’s paintings, which he saw in New York. He and his future wife, Judith Dolnick, were prominent in Chicago’s 1957 Momentum exhibition; and, in 1960, following their move to New York, Natkin was included in the Young America exhibition at the Whitney.
Natkin’s art is now in the permanent collections of many prominent museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim (New York), the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to name only a few.
LewAllen Contemporary is open 9:30-5:30 Monday through Saturday and 11:00-5:00 Sunday. Robert Natkin’s exhibition, Color Transcendence: A 50 Year Survey, runs from Friday, August 31, through Monday, October 15, 2007. For further information please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].
