TAGGART HOLLIS, NEW YORK NY, U.S.A.- New Acquisition.- Robert Natkin - May 13

📖 Legend:

Gallery Artist(s) Date Description Images Info Sponsor Press Office

TAGGART HOLLIS

Exhibition venue: 521 W 26th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10001

Location: NEW YORK NY, U.S.A.

Tel: T: 212.628.4000 F: 212.570.5786 | Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Opening Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11AM - 5PM

Locations's CITY(COUNTRY) : NEW YORK NY (U.S.A.) (2)

📍 All location(s) address:

NEW YORK NY - 521 W 26th Street, 7th Floor New York, NY 10001 (U.S.A.)
NEW YORK NY - 109 Norfolk Street New York, NY 10002 (U.S.A.)

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👥 Artists:

Robert Natkin

Artist Abstract:
Natkin was born in Depression-era Chicago in 1930, and began watching movies up to six times a week as a child. He enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948, where he was deeply influenced by French post-impressionism and the work of Klee. In 1957, Natkin and his wife, fellow artist Judith Dolnick, started a gallery in the run-down stretch of the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. From these humble beginnings, Natkin’s Wells Street Gallery grew in prominence, exhibiting works by artists such as Aaron Siskind, John Chamberlain, and Jackson Pollock. Two years later, the couple moved to New York, where Natkin’s career flourished. As he grew older, Natkin withdrew from the New York art world, eventually moving to Connecticut in 1970.

📅 Dates:

May 13

🖼️ Images:

Unknown (Field Mouse Series), 1970 Acrylic on canvas 96 x 88 in. (243.8 x 223.5 cm) Signed lower center: "Natkn"

📝 Exhibition Description:

Celebrated for his color field paintings that seem to glow from within, Robert Natkin (1930-2010) came of age in Chicago and was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. This present work Unknown (Field Mouse Series) (1970) is part of his Field Mouse series which he began in 1968. Departing from his architectural Apollo canvases, the Field Mouse works are more improvisational and abound with what Natkin called a “scatter balance” of patterns, flecks, and shapes. Unknown (Field Mouse Series) whispers to us through its dashes of pigment and crosshatching patches, and shows us why the artist has been described as the “author of a dappled infinite.”

Natkin’s Field Mouse series was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silberg (1922) at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a poem by Ezra Pound that deeply moved him:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough,
And life goes by
Like a field mouse,
Running through the grass not touching.

The critic Theodore F. Wolff captured the essence of Natkin’s work in 2004 as such: “Natkin has succeeded where so many have failed because he has had the innate good sense to approach beauty as though it were a lovely butterfly awaiting transportation to a special and mysterious garden rather than as that same butterfly destined to be mounted on a board. By that I mean that he coaxes and cajoles his colors, shapes, textures, and lines toward their final destinations on his canvas, and doesn’t push and pull them about as though they are puppets on his string.”

Other paintings from Natkin’s Field Mouse series include Untitled from the Field Mouse Series at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Field Mouse II at the Art Institute of Chicago, Field Mouse I at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and Field Mouse I at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Natkin’s work is in numerous other institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

The British art critic Peter Fuller, an early champion of Natkin, wrote extensively on Natkin's work and produced a documentary on the artist with BBC in 1982, which explored the relationship between art and psychoanalysis. Throughout his life, Natkin’s artistic journey was closely intertwined with his voracious reading and thinking about the human psyche