Works of the

1960s and 1970s

Works of the

1960s and 1970s

Frieze Masters 2012

Cheim & Read

Cheim & Read was founded in 1996 by co-owners John Cheim and Howard Read. The gallery focuses

primarily on the representation of an international group of leading contemporary artists, whose diverse

practices include painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video. Each artist represented by Cheim

& Read has exhibited extensively in museums and galleries throughout the world.

The gallery’s program is best characterized by its adherence to a rigorous curatorial model and its strength

in presenting critical monographic exhibitions for the work of its artists. Cheim & Read is also known

for organizing historically significant exhibitions including: “Joan Mitchell: The Last Decade,” “Louise

Bourgeois: The Fabric Works” and “The New Landscape/The New Still Life,” an in-depth examination of

Chaim Soutine’s influence on modern art.

Since its founding, Cheim & Read has also specialized in the resale of select works of art from the 20th

century by artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. Members of the Art

Dealers Association of America (ADAA), the gallery subscribes to the highest standard of connoisseurship,

scholarship and ethical practice, and offers an effective and confidential alternative for the transfer of

important works of art from and on behalf of private individuals and institutions.

Lynda Benglis Born 1941

Lynda Benglis was first recognized in the late sixties with her poured

latex and foam works. Benglis’s work created a perfectly timed retort

to the male dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the

advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of

metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with

the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range

of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft

becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen.

Lynda Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe and Ahmedabad, India.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National

Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Benglis’s

work is in extensive public collections including: Guggenheim Museum;

Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York;

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker

Art Center, Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Most recently Benglis was the subject of an international retrospective that traveled to: The Irish

Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; Museum

of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; New Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary

Art, Los Angeles.

Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times on February 17, 2011 of Benglis’s retrospective, “Whether

you have been watching Ms. Benglis’s varied career for decades or know her primarily from the latex

pieces and her star turn in Artforum, this exhibition pulls together and elaborates her remarkable

career in a thrilling way. It proves her work to be at once all over the place and very much of a piece,

as well as consistently, irrepressibly ahead of its time. This would seem to be every renegade artist’s

dream.”

Lynda Benglis Untitled 1970 pigmented polyurethane foam 3 1/2 x 36 x 54 in 8.9 x 91.4 x 137.2 cm

Lynda Benglis, 1970

Lynda Benglis Cocoon 1971 purified pigmented beeswax and damar resin on wood and masonite 36 x 5 in 91.4 x 12.7 cm

Lynda Benglis Come 1969-74 cast bronze 14 x 32 x 48 in 35.6 x 81.3 x 121.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois 1911—2010

Internationally renowned artist Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris

in 1911. Although she lived in New York from 1938 until her death in

2010, much of her inspiration was derived from her early childhood in

France. The family’s prosperous business was the restoration and resale

of seventeenth and eighteenth-century tapestries. She often spoke of her

early, emotionally conflicted family life; her practical and affectionate

mother, who was an invalid and her father’s domineering disposition, as

well as his marital infidelities.

Using the body as a primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of

the human condition. From poetic drawings to room-size installations,

she was able to give her fears a physical form in order to exorcise them.

Memories, love and abandonment are the core of her complex body of work.

Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983.

Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the

National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement

award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington D.C.; and election as a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the

Venice Biennale.

Louise Bourgeois's work appears in the most important museum collections worldwide and has been the

subject of several major traveling retrospectives organized by the Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges

Pompidou, Paris; the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunstverein, Frankfurt.

Louise Bourgeois Clutching 1962 bronze, black patina 12 x 13 x 12 in 30.5 x 33 x 30.5 cm

Louise Bourgeois, circa 1965Courtesy The Easton Foundation

© Louise Bourgeois Trust / Licensed by VAGA, NY

Louise Bourgeois Cumuls 1972 watercolor on paper 26 x 35 in 66 x 88.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois Avenza Revisited 1968-69 bronze with silver nitrate and polished patina 17 x 41 x 35 in 43.2 x 104.1 x 88.9 cm

Louise Bourgeois Unconscious Landscape 1967-68 bronze, black and polished patina 12 x 22 x 24 in 30.5 x 55.9 x 61 cm

Hans Hartung 1904 – 1989

Though German-born, Hans Hartung (1904 – 1989) is most often

identified by his artistic activity in Paris and his involvement in the

French Art Informel or Tachist movements. Though his post-war

paintings resembled gestural abstractions driven by an emotional,

intuitive source, they were surprisingly premeditated, carefully copied

from sometimes much earlier, spontaneous drawings and enlarged to

fit the canvas. Hartung’s exacting realization of his paintings provides

evidence of the great control, technical aptitude and thoughtfulness

with which he approached his work. His exploration of the varieties

of gesture and mark within self-imposed boundaries was to be an ever-

changing but life-long focus.

The two paintings presented for Frieze Masters, both dating 1971,

exemplify Hartung’s experimental approach. In the 1970s, Hartung

intentionally aimed to distance the artist’s gesture from the tool’s effect on the medium, resulting

in concise and elegant compositions. He avidly sought out a variety of tools, from self-modified

brushes and paint rollers to brooms and airbrushes. In T1971-R12 and T1971-R24, the characteristic

clarity of his colors—primarily saturated blues and yellows—are buoyed by a flat black ground,

which both intensifies hue and reveals process. In one, a brayer skids across the surface, resulting

in calligraphic, almost symbolic forms. In the other, paint is troweled and raked, leaving paths of

black through densely packed fields of color. Innovative and dramatic, they are witness to Hartung’s

continuous and fearless experimentation with mark-making. In relation to his artistic practice of the

1970s, Hartung stated: “Since 1970, I have had the feeling of a renewal. As if I had been granted new

energy, a new youth. And, above all, the need to make great paintings.”

Hans Hartung received numerous honors including; The Prix Guggenheim; The International

Grand Prize in Painting at the Venice Biennale; France’s International Order of Arts and Letters

(Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres); Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris and Grand Officier de la

Légion d’Honneur by President Mitterrand. Hartung’s work has been exhibited worldwide and was

presented in 2005 at the Museum of Fine Art, Beijing and traveled to the National Museum, Nanjing.

Hans Hartung T1971-R12 1971 acrylic on canvas 44 7/8 x 57 1/2 in 114 x 146 cm

Hans Hartung at the Metropolitan Museum, 1975

Hans Hartung T1971-R24 1971 acrylic on canvas 60 5/8 x 98 3/8 in 154 x 250 cm

Jannis Kounellis Born 1936

Jannis Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece in 1936. He moved

to Rome in 1956, where he became an active participant in the Arte

Povera movement in the 1960s. In 1969, he famously created Untitled

for Galleria L’Attico in Rome by positioning twelve live horses in a

rectangular exhibition space; the work deconstructed set ideas of

artistic practice and referenced the horse’s long history of cultural

and artistic representation. Kounellis strives to remove art from

its hierarchical structure and reposition it in co-existence with the

everyday. His use of substances like iron, cotton, coal, burlap, coffee,

and gold, as well as animate objects like birds, animals and fire,

produces multi-layered work that references cultural and political

conditions (commerce, agriculture, trade, labor) while maintaining

poetic and often profound dichotomies between his chosen materials.

Kounellis’s work can be defined by metamorphosis: his careful placement of objects transforms them

from the ordinary to the artistically resonant. His exhibition spaces often reference a stage, within

which his installations are a sort of theater. Contrasting materials become actively engaged characters;

the apparent tensions between them (rigid/malleable, animate/unmoving, organic/inorganic) provide

a sense of spontaneity, drama and implied narrative. In recent works, Kounellis’s use of personal

artifacts (overcoats, shoes, beds) and their associations with transience suggest the props of a refugee.

Ideas of transition, exile, and regeneration underscore a major theme of his work: the exploratory

journey and often nomadic search for self-identity. Kounellis’s works are distinguished not only by

an attempt to unify art and life, but, more importantly, by the dialogue that occurs between the two.

Kounellis lives and works in Rome. He had his first solo show in New York in 1972. Recently, he

has had exhibitions at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece; the Museum of Contemporary

Art, Herning, Denmark; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; the MADRE Museo d’Arte

Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy; and the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy,

among others. Kounellis’s work is represented in several American and international collections.

Jannis Kounellis Untitled 1967 wood panel painted black with hanging metal bird cage 78 3/4 x 63 in 200 x 160 cm

Jannis Kounellis, Performance at the Modern Art Agency, Naples, 1973

Man Ray 1890 – 1976

American artist Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitsky) was born

in Philadelphia in 1890. His family later moved to New York and

settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Man Ray studied drawing under

Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Ferrer Center in 1912, and

was profoundly influenced by the 1913 Armory Show, a renowned

avant-garde exhibition which introduced modern art to America. A

frequent visitor to Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, Man Ray discovered

burgeoning movements in contemporary European art, as well as

early American modernism and the photographic work of Stieglitz

and his circle. He began making abstract paintings and collages, and

in 1915 had his first solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery, New York.

Soon after he began experimenting in photography, a medium for

which he became best known.

Innovative and provocative, Man Ray straddled both the Dada and Surrealist movements and was

an important and influential contributor to each. With lifelong friend Marcel Duchamp and patron

Katherine Dreier, Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in 1920. In 1921, the same year Man Ray

moved to Paris, he and Duchamp produced “New York Dada,” a unique publication which chronicled the

movement. In Paris he began to explore photography further, and in 1922 began creating “rayographs,”

camera-less photographs similar to photograms, in which everyday objects were transformed into

enigmatic imagery. In 1925, he was represented in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, along with

Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.

Man Ray dismissed implied hierarchies between mediums and produced works in many different styles

and media. The paintings presented at Freize Masters both date from 1963. Referred to as “Natural

Paintings,” the works were created by squeezing tubes of paint directly on a plywood support. Another

board was pressed on top and removed, resulting in compositions unmitigated by the artist, as if they

had “made themselves.” Though Man Ray originally conceived of them as a reaction against Abstract

Expressionism and its prevailing focus on gesture, the works’ attention to material and process anticipate

artistic concerns of the coming 70s: for example, as seen in the poured work of Lynda Benglis or the

tool-driven investigations of Hans Hartung.

In 1940, Man Ray left for Los Angeles in order to avoid the German occupation of Paris during World

War II. In 1951, after over a decade of painting and making objects in Hollywood and New York, he

returned to Paris and remained there until his death in 1976. Throughout his life, Man Ray continued

to experiment, rejecting rigid definitions of art and expanding his own artistic practice.

Man Ray Othello II (Natural Painting) 1963 acrylic on plywood 17 1/8 x 13 1/4 in 43.9 x 34 cm

Man Ray, Paris circa 1950s

Man Ray Decembre Ou le Clown (Natural Painting) 1963 acrylic on plywood 17.3 x 14.2 in 43.9 x 36.1 cm

Joan Mitchell1925—1992

Born in Chicago in 1925, Joan Mitchell established herself as a

formidable talent in postwar New York’s avant-garde scene. In 1951,

her work was exhibited alongside that of Jackson Pollock, Willem

de Kooning, and Hans Hoffman in the celebrated “Ninth Street

Show,” which marked the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism

within the development of modern art. Exemplifying the ideals

of the New York School, Mitchell’s paintings wager all on the

expressive potential of the painterly mark itself, freed from

the constraints of traditional representation. Given the macho

posturing for which the movement’s adherents have earned

a reputation – almost all of them were men – Joan Mitchell’s

prowess in this milieu is all the more remarkable.

Mitchell was connected to her generation’s response to and redirection of gestural abstraction.

Sparked by elements and colors found in her surroundings—the circuitous line of the river, the

specific blue hue of the sky—Mitchell’s works are charged with a concentrated reaction to her

natural and emotional environment; they provide intimate evidence of a hand and mind in motion.

Critic John Yau has written, “It is her singular achievement to have stripped her process down to the

simplest means…in order to make her work allude to something far larger than landscape, and that

is the exigencies of life itself.”

Joan Mitchell has since been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, and examples of her

work hang in nearly all major public collections of modern art including: Centre Georges Pompidou,

Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Osaka

City Art Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Samsung Museum, Seoul and the Tate Gallery, London.

Joan Mitchell Untitled 1961 oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 20 3/4 in 72.4 x 52.7 cm

Joan Mitchell, Paris, 1963

© Estate of Joan Mitchell. Courtesy Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Joan Mitchell Le Chemin des Ecoliers 1960 oil on canvas 76 3/4 x 38 1/8 in 194.9 x 96.8 cm

Milton Resnick 1904 – 1989

Born in Bratslav, Ukraine in 1917, Resnick immigrated to the United

States with his family in 1922. In 1933, he transferred from Pratt,

where he studied commercial art, to the American Artists School in

order to focus on painting; he graduated in 1937. A first generation

New York School painter, Resnick maintained friendships with

Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. While his early work reflected

the tenets of Abstract Expressionism, Resnick ultimately eclipsed

more traditional notions of the genre. His transition from explicitly

Abstract Expressionist modes to the dense and heavily-impastoed

monochrome canvases of his later years resulted from an intensive

exploration of paint’s materiality and the subsequent dissolution of

form and “image.” Resnick’s allegiance to the physical properties of

paint, its viscosity and “actuality,” was in turn predictive of younger painters like Cy Twombly, Robert

Ryman and Frank Stella, and anticipated artistic movements concerned with process, materiality,

and perception.

Resnick strived to distill abstraction to its essence, championing an “all-over” approach to the canvas

and refusing prescribed “meaning.” Though seemingly impenetrable, his work achieves visceral

duality. Often characterized by their massive size, the paintings intentionally remain within the

viewer’s peripheral vision: they are meant to locate one in space and, more significantly, at a place.

Unyielding surfaces become reflective, almost luminous. The effect of time, or rather the aspiration

to timelessness, is apparent: the paintings seem to hover in a constant state of “becoming.” For the

patient viewer, Resnick’s work is transcendent. He stated: “Art is not a learning process. It is the very

reverse of learning. It is the unhinging of your soul from your sight.”

Resnick died March 12, 2004. Roberta Smith, for his New York Times obituary, wrote: “Mr. Resnick

might qualify as the last Abstract Expressionist painter.” Widely shown, his work is represented

in many American and international collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada; the Australian

National Gallery, Canberra, Australia; the Malmö Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Modern

Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, among many others. Recent exhibitions include solo

shows at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco and Cheim & Read, New York, and group shows at

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisz and Fundacion Caja, Madrid, and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine

Arts, Moscow, among others.

Milton Resnick Continent 1963 oil on paper mounted on linen 66 1/4 x 42 in 168.3 x 106.7 cm

Milton Resnick, Circa 1967

Milton Resnick Fire B 1975 oil on canvas 90 1/4 x 80 in 229.2 x 203.2 cm

John Cheim Principal/Head of Exhibitions john@cheimread.com

Howard Read Principal/Partner howard@cheimread.com

Mary Gail Parr Partner/Administrative Director marygail@cheimread.com

Adam Sheffer Partner/Sales Director adam@cheimread.com

547 WEST 25 STREET NEW YORK NY USA 10001

TEL +1 212 242 7727 FAX +1 212 242 7737

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GHADA AMER

DON BACHARDY

DONALD BAECHLER

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

LYNDA BENGLIS

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

WILLIAM EGGLESTON

LOUISE FISHMAN

ADAM FUSS

RON GORCHOV

HANS HARTUNG

JENNY HOLZER

BILL JENSEN

CHANTAL JOFFE

JANNIS KOUNELLIS

JONATHAN LASKER

McDERMOTT & McGOUGH

BARRY McGEE

JOAN MITCHELL

PAUL MORRISON

JACK PIERSON

TAL R

MILTON RESNICK

JOHN SONSINI

PAT STEIR

JUAN USLÉ

OTTO ZITKO

Cover: Louise Bourgeois Untitled 1969 watercolor and charcoal on paper 25 3/4 x 39 in 65.4 x 99.1 cm

Cheim & Read