2013 Art Southampton

Anthony Japour takes us to the Hamptons

Anthony Japour (AJ) is an art collector, advisor, independent curator, and private art dealer. Japour deals in the international contemporary art movement with a focus on the Chinese Contemporary Art Movement and its relationship to the pillars of Western Contemporary Art. Since 2003, AJ has produced numerous art exhibitions and installations in Miami and South Florida through AJ Japour Gallery and now works on various art projects. AJ has served on the Fine Arts Board and the Cultural Arts Council of the City of Miami Beach.

Each year for the last few years, I‘ve been visiting the Hamptons during summer, which now has three art fairs in the course of one month. This year I attended the Art Southampton Art Fair, the new Parish Art Museum and at a private home had the opportunity to meet and chat with one of my favorite artists, Cindy Sherman!

Adolph Gottlieb (American, 1903-1974)

Antoine Helwaser Gallery
511 West 25th St, Suite 403
New York, NY 10001

Yares Art Projects
123 Grant Ave.

Santa Fe, NM 87501

Adolph Gottlieb is part of the original group of artists known as the Abstract Expressionists.
Adolph Gottlieb, Roman Three No. 2, 1963
Oil on Canvas, 90 x 60 IN
Courtesy Yares Art Projects, Sante Fe
$1,200,000.00 Born in New York and educated in Europe and New York City, Gottlieb was both a teacher and a painter. In the 1930’s as the Whitney Museum of Art was being established by Gertude Whitney, the wife of Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin, abstract art was not yet in favor— at least not by her. Ms. Whitney favored more figurative paintings and most of the works exhibited in the Whitney Biennial and Annual during those years were of realist works.

As a protest to the Whitney Museum of American Art, Gottlieb along with Mark Rothkowitz (who later shortened his name to Rothko), and eight other artists established themselves as “The Ten” in counter distinction to “The Eight” which was the title of a Whitney Museum exhibition of figurative painters. Gottlieb and the others exhibited their works together during the latter half of the 1930’s and in 1938 mounted their own show at a private gallery entitled The Ten: Whitney Dissenters.

Later in life, Gottlieb moved to the desert where his abstract works took on that of the landscape. Two works of his last series known as the Burst paintings were exhibited by Antoine Helwaser Gallery and Yares Art Projects; Gottlieb combined his mastery of color, abstraction, and meaning into these final paintings

Helen Frankenthaler (American 1928-2011)

Hollis Taggart Galleries

958 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10021

Helen Frankenthaler is best known as the pioneer of Color Field painting which inspired other Color Field painters, namely Morris Louis (see below) and Kenneth Noland. Frankenthaler poured thinned paint with turpentine in washes that look like staining rather than painting onto the canvas— the technique became known as Color Field painting. This genre is considered by some to be the second generation of American Abstraction, the first being Abstract Expressionism.

Even as late as the 1950’s, art was a man’s world and few women were recognized for their artistic talent. Frankenthaler was from a prominent Manhattan family who supported her work as an artist. Later, she married Robert Motherwell, also part of the abstract expressionist movement; to some critics, she had a greater influence on his subsequent work than he did on hers. Frankenthaler and Motherwell loved to entertain lavishly and were known as the “Golden Couple” in New York society circles.

More recently, in the Spring of 2013, Helen Frankenthaler received attention in the press because Larry Gagosian, the art dealer from New York who owns Gagosian Gallery mounted a major exhibition of the artist’s works from 1950-1959. Prices for her works are also going up. Hollis Taggart Galleries at the Southampton Art Fair exhibited a later work of Frankenthaler, Bella Donna, 1987 priced at $1,100,000. Not so long ago, you could buy a Frankenthaler for less than $50,000.

Frankenthaler clearly loved to find the beauty in painting: “What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it’s pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is – did I make a beautiful picture?”

Frankenthaler received numerous accolades, including prestigious awards and honorary degrees from Harvard University; Yale University; Smith College; Moore College of Art, Philadelphia; Amherst College; New York University; and Brandeis University. Her works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and numerous other public institutions.

Morris Louis (American, 1912-1962)

Yares Art Projects
123 Grant Ave.

Santa Fe, NM 87501

Morris Louis (born Louis Morris Bernstein) spent most of his life in the mid-Atlantic of the United States and created important paintings by innovating new ways to pour paint onto the canvas by staining. In particular, he pioneered the use of Magna paint, a newly (at the time) developed oil-based acrylic paint. On view at the Southampton Art Fair was one of Louis’ series of Stripe paintings where he used Magna on canvas. With his technique, Louis eliminated completely the gestural brush strokes of the Abstract Expressionists and in its place began to pleat the canvas into troughs wherein he poured the paint drawn into the canvas by gravity.

Educated at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts, Louis had many jobs before settling in Washington D.C. After a visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in New York City with Kenneth Noland in 1952, both artists were so inspired by her Color Field technique that they began to experiment with this process, which later defined each of these artists’ work for the rest of their careers.

Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York exhibited this past winter the works of Morris Louis along side Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella. Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery exhibited Louis at Art Basel, June 2013. Louis’ work is contained at many institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.