Walter Darby Bannard

We are preparing for our Walter Darby Bannard exhibition, opening on November 15, 2018. Please read our online catalogue to learn more about the artist and his career.

Walter Darby Bannard: Paintings from 1969 to 1975
November 15 - December 21, 2018

Opening Reception
November 15, 2018
6 - 8 PM

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, is hosting ”Walter Darby Bannard: 1959-1962,” a focused show exhibiting the breakthrough works of the American abstract painter. On view through January 6, 2019, the exhibition showcases some of the early and rarely seen works of the artist.

“Walter Darby Bannard: 1959-1962” focuses on a significant period of the artist career — a time when he abandoned gestural brushwork and developed a pared-down geometric vocabulary. The period on focus represented for Bannard a moment of reckoning with the lessons and legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Bannard who lived in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, had the desire to usher in a new era in American painting.

Walter Darby Bannard | 1959 - 1962
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
April 26 - January 6, 2018  

Walter Darby Bannard | 1959-1962 is a focused exhibition of a series of breakthrough paintings the artist produced over a period of several years, during which he abandoned gestural brushwork and developed a pared-down geometric vocabulary. The early works presented have rarely and only recently been exhibited.

Not many art lovers know Darby Bannard, even though he lived a long time and accomplished many things. In the late fifties, Bannard and his friend Frank Stella inspired themselves to make pictures that were very direct, to the point not many recognized them as “paintings” until almost 10 years later. In a letter to me he said the rules they followed were “the work should be very simple, flat, symmetrical and inexpressive.”( 1 ) The result, for Bannard, were pictures that can be described as direct, “in your face”.

This spring, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) will mount major solo exhibitions for Terry Adkins and Donald Judd, alongside an exhibition of works by Francis Alÿs, a tribute to Walter Darby Bannard, and a commissioned project by emerging artist Diamond Stingily. Highlighting experimental practices from 1959 to present day, ICA Miami's spring exhibitions reflect the museum's commitment to advancing scholarship on artists at all stages of their careers.

WALTER DARBY BANNARD WAS BORN TO WIN. He was the perfect American, a taller, more physically imposing but equally charming version of Warren Beatty, smiling and savvy, brilliant but mischievous. He could have been a movie star, a tennis pro, or at the very least a successful banker sporting a navy blazer and Exeter and Princeton degrees. But he wanted none of what the world could offer him.    

When word broke on Facebook on October 2 that Walter Darby Bannard had died, I received more than the ordinary number of worried or consolatory emails. This was proof, if I needed any, that he was widely known and loved, not only for his fine painting but also for his teaching, for his role as dauntless defender of modernism in print, and for simply being a very nice guy. More    

The magnificent painter Elisabeth Condon, who in early October met me at her show at Lesley Heller Workspace, did her best to console me when I broke into tears. I had been expressing my hope, shared among all of us who cared about Walter Darby Bannard, that he would be able to attend the opening for his exhibition of recent paintings at Berry Campbell Gallery, eleven days away. Those hopes had been banished that morning. He had succumbed to complications ensuing from treatments for liver cancer. Elisabeth remarked sagely: “He’ll have the last word. That was always his way.”

American abstract painter Walter Darby Bannard died on Sunday, October 2, 2016 in Miami, announced Berry Campbell gallery. He was 82 years old. A pioneer of color field painting in the 1950s, Walter Darby Bannard (1934-2016) was committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over six decades.

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.