BIOGRAPHY
WALTER DARBY BANNARD
Walter Darby Bannard (1934-2016) was a leading figure in the development of Color Field painting in the late 1950s and 1960s. Bannard was born in 1934 in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Princeton University in 1956. During his years at Princeton University, he joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella and the art historian Michael Fried, in conversations that led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art. In the late 1950s, Bannard became one of the first Minimalist artists. His groundbreaking paintings, characterized by suspended rectangles and circles set against flat constrasting backgrounds, questioned the viewers perception of space, and helped define pathways away from Abstract Expressionism.
In 1964, he was included in the landmark exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by Clement Greenberg and held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He had three solo exhibitions in 1965, at Kasmin Gallery, London; Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago; and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. He was also included that year in the Museum of Modern Art’s, The Responsive Eye. In 1968, Bannard received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Foundation of the Arts Award. Over the course of his career, Bannard had almost one hundred solo exhibitions and was included in an even greater number of group shows. He is represented in public collections across the country as well as abroad, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
FULL BIOGRAPHY
A leading figure in the development of Color Field painting in the late 1950s and an important American abstract painter, Walter Darby Bannard (better known as Darby Bannard) was committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over five decades.
During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, he joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella and the critic and art historian Michael Fried, in conversations that expanded aesthetic definitions and led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art. Bannard continued to explore attributes of color, paint, and surface through innovative methods, striving throughout his career for vital and original expressive means. He was also an important writer on formalist issues in art, serving as an editor for Artforum and a contributor to Art International. His extensive publications date from the 1960s to the end of his life. In the early 1990s, Bannard moved to Miami where he served as professor and head of painting at the University of Miami, Coral Gables.
Bannard was born in 1934 in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Princeton University in 1956. Bannard, who made drawings and watercolors throughout his youth, was self-taught as a painter. He derived inspiration for his earliest paintings from the art of William Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still. By the late 1950s, he had turned from an expressionistic style to working with large areas of contrasting color, creating austere minimal paintings. In the next decade, he was one of the first artists to blend artist’s materials with commercially produced tinted alkyd resin house paints in a search for greater color options. In 1964, he was included in the landmark exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by Clement Greenberg and held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first solo exhibitions were in 1965, at Kasmin Gallery, London; Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago; and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. He was also included that year in the Museum of Modern Art’s, The Responsive Eye. In 1968, Bannard received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Foundation of the Arts Award.
In about 1970, Bannard’s focus shifted to an exploration of the liquid quality of paint. Drawn to the new acrylic mediums that were becoming available, he began working on the floor using thick gel surfaces and color suspended in Magna or polymer mediums. At the time, he “thought of color as a liquid, flowing over and settling on a roughened surface, changing as it mixed and dried.” His method involved stapling his canvases to slightly raised wooden platforms. After tightly sizing his canvases, he scraped on colored gel with squeegee-like tools. When the surface was dry, he poured colored polymer over it in layers, allowing the paint to find its place. He was drawn at the time to close-valued rather than strong colors and often allowed his pale warm grounds to serve as colors in their own right rather than acting as supports for other colors. Karen Wilkin stated in Color as Field (2007): “Bannard probed just how subtle chromatic nuances could be before they became unbroken expanse. In these pictures, even composition could be reduced to a kind of near-negative, an echo of something no longer there.” (p. 61) In the late 1970s, Bannard was instrumental in the retrospective exhibition of the work of Hans Hofmann. He curated the 1976-77 exhibition and wrote the catalogue that accompanied it.
During a painting workshop in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1981, Bannard developed a kind of gel “drawing” on canvas, in which he applied his paint on large sheets of fiberglass. By the middle of the decade, he had returned to a slower, more subtle system of marking his gel, while also returning to pouring colored polymer. He also reincorporated expressionist methods in his art. In 1987, he began his “brush and cut” paintings, consisting of large-scale canvases in which he applied transparent tinted gel with large street brooms and industrial floor squeegees to make painted “drawings,” featuring vigorous brushwork and three-dimensional illusions. After moving to Miami, he incorporated more color into his large paintings, while producing small mixed-media “landscapes” on paper, inspired by the flat land and water and the lowering sun of the Florida Everglades.
Throughout his career, Bannard moved between the poles of Expressionism and Color Field painting, resulting in a body of art that constantly evolved as the artist forthrightly faced the situations that his art presented, reacting to them with rigor and intuition.
In 1983, Bannard held an Invitational Residency at the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at many art schools, including the University of Miami, Florida, and the School of Visual Arts, New York. Over the course of his career, Bannard had almost one hundred solo exhibitions and was included in an even greater number of group shows. He is represented in public collections across the country as well as abroad.
His museum collections include Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina; Baltimore Museum, Maryland; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Blanton Museum of Art, The University at Texas, Austin; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee; Cleveland Museum, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Texas; Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York; Honolulu Museum, Hawaii; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Kenyon College Art Gallery, Ohio; LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia; Lawrenceville School Art Museum, New Jersey; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Miami University Art Museum, Florida; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, kansas City, Missouri; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada; and Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
-Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.
© Berry Campbell
CV
Born, 1934 New Haven, Connecticut
1956, Princeton University
1983, National Endowment for the Arts, Invitational Residency
Died, 2016, Miami, Florida
AWARDS
1968, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
1968, National Foundation of the Arts Award
1981, Distinguished Classmate Award, Princeton University Class of 1956
1986, Francis J. Greenburger Foundation Award
1991, Richard A. Florsheim Art Fund Grant
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
Kasmin Gallery, London, 1965.
Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago, 1965.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York 1965.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1966.
Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, 1967.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1967.
Kasmin Gallery, London, 1968.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1968.
Bennington College, Vermont, 1969.
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, 1969.
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, 1970.
Joseph Helman Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, 1970.
Kasmin Gallery, London, 1970.
Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York, 1970.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1970.
Neuendorf Gallery, Cologne, Germany, 1971.
Kasmin Gallery, London, 1972.
Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, 1972.
Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York, 1972.
Baltimore Museum of Art (traveled to High Museum, Atlanta; Houston Museum of Art, Texas) 1973.
Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York, 1973.
Pasadena Art Museum, California, 1973.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1974.
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, 1975.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1975.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1976.
Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, 1977.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1977.
Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, 1977.
David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, 1978.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1978.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1979.
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1979.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1980.
Ulrich Art Museum, Wichita State University, Kansas, 1980.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1981.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1982.
Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1983.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1983.
Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1983.
Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, 1984.
Salander-O'Reilly Gallery, New York, 1986.
Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University, New York, 1987.
Richard Love Gallery, Chicago, 1988.
Greenberg Wilson Gallery, New York, 1989.
Greenberg Wilson Gallery, New York, 1990.
Miami-Dade Community College, Florida, 1990.
Knoedler Gallery, London, 1991.
Montclair Museum of Art, New Jersey, 1991.
Farah Damji Gallery, New York, 1993.
Dorsch Gallery, Miami, Florida, 1996.
Lee Scarfone Gallery, University of Tampa, Florida, Walter Darby Bannard Retrospective of 47 paintings, 1997.
Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida, Darby Bannard: Paintings 1987-1999, 1999.
Emory & Henry College, Virginia, Darby Bannard: Recent Acrylic Paintings and Oilstick/MM Paintings of the 1990s, 2002.
Rauschenberg Gallery, Edison College, Fort Myers, Florida, Moving into Color: Paintings by Darby Bannard, 2006.
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 2006.
Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York, 2007.
Center for Visual Communication, Miami, Florida, Darby Bannard, The Miami Years, Then and Now: A Retrospective Exhibit of 20 Years of Painting, 2009.
Berry Campbell, Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water, 2014.
Berry Campbell, Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings (1958-1965), 2015.
Berry Campbell, Walter Darby Bannard: Recent Paintings, 2016.
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Early Paintings, 2018
Berry Campbell, New York, Walter Darby Bannard: Paintings (1969 – 1975), 2018
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
Los Angeles County Museum (traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Toronto Art Museum, Toronto, Canada) Post Painterly Abstraction, 1964.
Chicago Art Museum, Illinois 1965.
Museum of Modern Art, New York (traveling United States museum tour), The Responsive Eye, 1965.
University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania 1965.
Museum of Modern Art Embassies Program, 1966.
Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, American Painters, 1966.
Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, Color, Image and Form, 1967.
Whitney Museum, Annual, New York, 1967.
Museum of Modern Art, New York (tour of European and American museums), Art of the Real, 1968.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Biannual, Washington DC, 1969.
Kunstmarkt, Cologne, Germany, One Tendency of Contemporary Art, 1969.
Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis, The Development of Modernist Painting: Jackson Pollock to the Present, 1969.
Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Annual, 1969.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, (traveling to Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio), Color and Field, 1890 – 1970, 1970.
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, The Form of Color, 1970.
University of Pennsylvania, Two Generations of Color Painting, 1970.
Venice Biennale, American Artists, 1970.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, (traveling to Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin) Six Painters, 1971.
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, Toward Color and Field, 1971.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Structure of Color, 1971.
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, American Art, 1972.
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio, 9 American Painters, 1972.
Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, (traveling to Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada), Masters of the Sixties, 1972.
Galerie und Edition Merian, Krefeld, Germany, Bannard, Goodnough, Noland, Olitski, Poons, Stella, 1972.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Painting and Sculpture Today – 1972, 1972.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Abstract Painting in the '70s, 1972.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquisitions, 1972.
Whitney Museum of American Art, Annual, New York, 1972.
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Canada, 11 American Artists, 1973.
New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey, Curator's Choice, 1973.
University of Texas, Austin, The Michener Collection, American Paintings of the 20th Century, 1973.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, Contemporary American Artists, 1974.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970, 1974.
Whitney Museum, Continuing Abstraction in American Art, 1974.
Museum of Modern Art, New York, American Art Since 1945, from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, 1975.
Galerie Ulysses, Vienna, Austria, 1976.
Galleria Civica, Modena, Italy, Cronaca, 1976.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Private Images: Photographs by Painters, 1977.
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, Painting and Sculpture Today 1978, 1978.
Park-McCullough House, Bennington, Vermont, 15 Sculptors in Steel Around Bennington 1963 – 1978, 1978.
Knoedler Galleries, New York, 1979.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Art in America After World War II, 1979.
International Communications Agency, Washington DC, 1981.
Sheldon Memorial Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri, 1981.
National Collection of American Art, Washington DC, Recent Trends in Collecting: 20th Century Painting from the National Museum of Art, 1982.
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, National Midyear Exhibition, 1983.
The Queens Museum, Flushing, New York, Twentieth Century Art from the Metropolitan Museum: Selected Recent Acquisitions, 1983.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Directions in Contemporary American Ceramics, 1984.
List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, Definitive Statements - American Art: 1964 – 1966, 1986.
Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Florida, The Moffett Collection, 1990.
Galerie 1900-2000, Paris, Free Market, 1990.
Fort Lauderdale Art Museum, Florida, Stars in Florida, 1992.
Galerie de Poche, Paris, Abstractions and Monochromes, 1992.
Denver Art Museum, Colorado, The Denver Art Museum, 1883-1993, 1993.
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, Masters of the Masters, 1997.
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, Masters of the Masters, 1998.
Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California, The Rowan Collection: Passion and Patronage - Painting in Los Angeles and New York, 1999.
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, Clement Greenberg: A Critics Collection, 2001.
Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Color Field Revisited: Paintings from the Albright Knox Art Gallery, 2004.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Minimalist Painting, 2004.
The Painting Center, New York, Hans Hofmann: The Legacy, 2005.
Palm Springs Desert Museum, California, Modernism and Abstraction, 2005.
Syracuse University Art Gallery, New York, Meaning and Metaphor, 2006.
Denver Art Museum, Colorado, Color as Field, 2007
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Born in the USA, 2007.
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art, 2008.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, Color into Light, 2008.
Jacobson Howard Gallery, New York, Circa 1959: Transitions in the Work of Nine Abstract Painters, 2009.
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, Art Since 1945: In a New Light, 2009.
Center for Visual Communication, Miami, Florida, Darby Bannard and the Miami School, 2010.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Abstract USA '58 - '68, 2010.
Galerie Konzette, Vienna, Austria, Mono, Poly, Concrete, 2011.
Taubman Museum, Roanoke, Virginia, Nature and the Non-Objective Realm, 2011.
Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, Color Field Revised, 2011.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2015.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2016.
Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, Belgium, Post-Painterly Abstraction: Belgium-USA, 2016.
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2017.
Cavalier Galleries, New York, 57th Street, America’s Artistic Legacy, Part I, 2018
Watson MacRae Gallery, Sanibel Island, Hollis Jeffcoat | Darby Bannard – That Devil Paint, 2018
Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, Summer Selections, 2018
InLiquid, Philadelphia, Bannard, Connelly, and Romberg – The Collection of Caroline Dunlop Millett, 2018
Berry Campbell, New York, Summer Selections, 2019.
Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, The De Luxe Show, 2021.
Karma Gallery, New York, The De Luxe Show, 2021.
Stamford Museum & Nature Center, Connecticut, Discovering Color: Two Decades of Abstraction, 2022.
SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio
Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada
Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi
Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina
Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain
Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
Blanton Museum of Art, The University at Texas, Austin
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
Denver Art Museum, Colorado
Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York
Honolulu Museum, Hawaii
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Kenyon College Art Gallery, Ohio
LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia
Lawrenceville School Art Museum, New Jersey
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Miami University Art Museum, Florida
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
Newark Museum, New Jersey
Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Portland Museum of Art, Maine
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts
Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York
The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey