Walter Darby Bannard

The presence of Walter Darby Bannard in my life was an accident. I went to graduate school at the University of Miami largely because my father was the dean of the College of Engineering and it made financial sense for my family. Darby was increasingly having trouble selling paintings in New York by the early '90s, he admitted to me, but he could have ended up at a lot of schools that would be happy to have someone of his caliber on the faculty. South Florida, he said, had the advantage of being warm.

A dozen or so canvases from 1958 to 1965 that were on view recently at Berry Campbell made it clear why Bannard, who is now eighty, was selected for these shows. Even back in the day, the emergent artist’s Minimalist compositions must have seemed timeless. These are, to be sure, smart paintings. And while it’s tempting to raise the specter of formalism today, it’s perhaps more apt to suggest that the nearly five-foot-square canvases call to mind a foreign language that’s almost been forgotten.

Altoon Sultan blogs about Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings, 1958-1965 at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, through April 18, 2015.

Sultan writes: "Bannard's color is unique and surprising. In the exhibition ... there are pinks and warm reds and cool greens, and all colors confound expectations with their pleasurable seriousness. After all...pink? When I think of a great painter using pink, Philip Guston comes to mind; in his works pink becomes a subversive color. Bannard's pink isn't brash and saturated, but subtle; it looks like a mixed hue. The circle sits solidly in its field, perfectly balanced, slightly above the midpoint of a rectangle slightly taller than square. The pink becomes transcendent."

When I think of minimalist painting, colors that come to mind are primaries and black, as in Mondrian, red/blue/green as in Ellsworth Kelly, white in Robert Ryman: simple clear colors. Robert Mangold uses some offbeat hues, grays and oranges and lemon yellows. But Walter Darby Bannard's color is unique and surprising. In the exhibition at Berry Campbell Gallery "Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings, 1958-1965" there are pinks and warm reds and cool greens, and all colors confound expectations with their pleasurable seriousness.

The majority of what I know about art is owed to two things. The first is making a lot of paintings and drawings. The second is conversations with Walter Darby Bannard.

“Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings, 1958-1965” featured in Artsy Gallery Guide

Berry Campbell exhibition, Walter Darby Bannard | Minimalist Color Field Paintings 1958-1965, recommended on Artnet News

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce, Walter Darby Bannard: Minimal Color Field Paintings 1958 - 1965 featuring rare paintings and works on paper from the artist’s early years as a painter in New York and New Jersey.  Bannard (b. 1934), a leader in the development of Color Field Painting in the late 1950s, has been committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over five decades.  The exhibition opens on Thursday, March 19 with a reception from 6pm to 8pm.  The artist will be in attendance. The exhibition is accompanied by a twenty page catalogue, including fourteen color illustrations and a brief essay, The Shape of Color, written by Walter Darby Bannard.

Walter Darby Bannard is a hedonist, and proud of it. He believes that the role of art is to give pleasure. It’s not meant to be an intellectual exercise, or political propaganda, or even an illustration of something that it’s not (though he has plenty of room in his lexicon for representational painters, past and present, whose work pleasures the eye, regardless of what else it may or may not do).

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, February 11, 2014 – Berry Campbell is pleased to announce, Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water, featuring sixteen paintings from the 1970s. Bannard, a leader in the development of Color Field Painting in the late 1950s, has been 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.