TREASURE:
William Baziotes (1912 – 1963)
Untitled (Woman on a Beach), 1941
oil on masonite
65-318-1

William Baziotes was one of Reading’s most famous and important 20^th century artists. Baziotes was born in Pittsburgh, but his family moved to Reading when he was one year old. His father, a Greek immigrant, became a partner in a restaurant on Penn Street called the Crystal. He graduated from Reading High School and worked for the Kase Glass Company (which specialized in stained glass) in Reading. Kase provided him with an opportunity to further his interest in art and develop some basic skills.

During these years he also met Reading’s most significant poet, Byron Vazakas, who befriended the somewhat shy and introspective Baziotes. Vazakas became his mentor and introduced him to the French Symbolist poets (especially Baudelaire, Valéry, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.) Poetry, and especially this specific poetry, would go on to play a critical role in the creation of his art throughout his life. In 1933, Baziotes moved to New York City to study painting full time.

Baziotes is associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement (sometimes called The New York School) that originated in New York during his time there. Abstract Expressionism (AE) is the first American artistic movement to gain worldwide importance. AE can itself be divided into several broader groups, especially Action Painting (Jackson Pollock, et al) and Color Field Painting (Mark Rothko, et al). Baziotes, while continuing to work in abstraction, took his art more in the direction of Surrealism than most of his AE colleagues. He began to experiment with a Surrealist concept called Automatism. In this process, he developed a painting by spreading color thinly on the canvas intuitively until some image accidentally emerged in his mind that he could then go on to adjust and shape as a painting. These Baziotes paintings, including the one shown here, derived from the subconscious and are, typically, fantastic and dreamlike –eerie and mysterious.

While many of Baziotes’ mature works include human and animal forms, mostly as biomorphic shapes, the untitled woman on a beach clearly depicts a female figure. This clarity of the figure is unusual in most of Baziotes’ abstract surrealist work.

As with many of the Abstract Expressionists, the WPA Federal Arts Program employed Baziotes, and he was assigned to be an art teacher at the Queens Museum. He continued his teaching throughout his career and at one point founded (with Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko ) the Subjects of the Artist school in New York City. He also taught at NYU and the Brooklyn Museum.

Peggy Guggenheim gave Baziotes his first solo show in her Art of the Century Gallery in 1944. In 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum did a memorial exhibition of his work.

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TREASURE:
Matthew Daub (1951 - )
Spring Street, 2001
2001-8-1

Over the past decade, Dr. Robert Metzger, Director Emeritus of the Reading Public Museum has created, designed, and curated more than 75 separate exhibits at the Museum. The single most successful of those exhibits in terms of attendance at the opening reception was the work of Matthew Daub.

In the Introduction to the catalog of the Daub exhibit, Metzger describes the work in this way:

The art of Matthew Daub celebrates the great American Road, whether it be the railroad, highway, or city street. Each image invites the observer on a solitary yet fascinating journey through the urban landscape which developed in the shadow of American Industry. Daub’s fascination with the man-made geometry of bygone industry results in a portrait of city life of crystalline clarity in which light is never merely a physical phenomenon, but takes on a tangible prismatic and dramatic form.

In the Foreword of the same catalog, William Louis-Dreyfus (whom Daub describes as a “patron, collector and friend for many years”) spells out the skill and talent needed to paint in watercolors in Daub’s technique.

Few understand the mastery required nor the risks involved in being a watercolorist. Every use of the brush is a high wire gesture, a turning and somersault without a net, where all errors are fatal. No misstep is forgiven. All failures are fatal.

Many of the paintings in the Daub exhibit were painted in Reading, in Fleetwood where Daub lives, and in Kutztown, where he works as a professor in the art.