News

Bridgehampton artist Eric Dever's painting NSIBTW 50 was acquired for the Parrish Art Museum's permanent collection. He is represented by Berry Campbell gallery in New York.

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.”

The role of female artists in the development of Abstract Expressionism has historically been underplayed and the consequent value of their work in the marketplace diminished. But women played a key role in the articulation of the movement: as early as 1942, Lee Krasner’s work was exhibited alongside that of Jackson Pollock, her future husband; Joan Mitchell, Perle Fine, and Mary Abbott were regularly invited to the members-only Eighth Street Club, founded in 1949 by Willem de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt and others; and Elaine de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler (who later married Robert Motherwell) were included in the seminal ‘Ninth Street Exhibition’ alongside Krasner and Mitchell, organised by Leo Castelli in 1951. Women also participated in the museum shows of the day; Grace Hartigan took part in the 1956 MoMA exhibition ‘Twelve Americans’, which also featured paintings by Philip Guston and Franz Kline.    

The exhibition presents selected works from the well-known series of paintings by American painter Jon Schueler, “Women in the Sky,” comprising eighteen oils and eight works on paper on display. Jon Schueler’s work incorporates human form, or its memories and mysteries, as figure has been a major influence in his thoughts which prominently reflected in his works. 

Walter Darby Bannard, a Color Field painter whose elegant, severe abstract paintings of the late 1950s and early ’60s were the springboard for a lifetime’s exploration of color, form and the physicality of paint, died on Sunday in Miami. He was 82.

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.

Walter Darby Bannard, an American abstract painter and a pioneer of Color Field painting in the 1950s, died on Sunday, October 2, in Miami at the age of eighty-two.

Although the scratchy lines convey a certain sense of itchiness or irritation, they are set in a context of quiet reflection. Thus as a whole these paintings are harmonious, not grating, organized and not chaotic. 

Above all, they are triumphantly human – though occasionally, a wild little sun puts in an appearance, as in the small gem that greets the visitor upon entering the gallery, and is entitled, “Winter Country Fields and Sky” (2015).