William Baziotes
William Baziotes
1912 - 1963
American painter. Baziotes was brought up in Reading, PA, by his Greek immigrant parents. When his father’s business failed in the mid-1920s, he was exposed to poverty and the life of illegal gambling dens and local brothels, all of which later contributed to the spirit of evil lurking in his paintings. In the early 1930s he worked briefly for a company specializing in stained glass for churches, which may have affected the mysterious and translucent painted environments in his later canvases. His early interest in poetry was heightened by his close friendship with the Reading poet Byron Vazakas, who introduced him to the work of CHARLES BAUDELAIRE and the French Symbolists; these writers soon became an important source for Baziotes’s own search to communicate strong emotions and bizarre states of mind. Themes from Baudelaire’s poetry are suggested in Baziotes’s treatment of twilight, water, the colour green and mirrors, while The Balcony (1944; Santa Barbara, CA, Wright Ludington priv. col., see Sandler, p. 75) is among the paintings to derive its title from a specific poem.
In 1933 Baziotes moved to New York, where he studied at the NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN until 1936. There he produced traditional drawings of heavy-set nudes, which anticipate the ponderous and distorted figures that appeared in later paintings such as Cyclops (1947; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.). Baziotes worked on the WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION FEDERAL ARTS PROJECT as a teacher at the Queens Museum, New York (1936–41), yet he felt alienated from the current social concerns.
Baziotes was more sympathetic to the exiled European Surrealists based in New York from 1938 to 1944, especially to ROBERTO MATTA, whom he met in the spring of 1940. The irrational spatial webs and gaseous atmospheres of Matta’s paintings were reflected in early works by Baziotes such as the Butterflies of Leonardo da Vinci (1942; artist’s estate, see Sandler, p. 73). The Surrealists encouraged Baziotes’s sense of fantasy and introduced him to the concept of ‘psychic’ AUTOMATISM by which marks made spontaneously were thought to release subconscious associations. Baziotes modified this idea into a painting method that one critic called ‘slow automatism’. Although he worked over his pictures many times in rich translucent glazes, he attempted to begin each painting session without preconceptions.
Two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, of works by Picasso (1939) and Miró (1941) were also influential in Baziotes’s development. He was struck by the bizarre distortions of Picasso’s figures and by Miró’s fluid environments and primitivist signs. He also admired the rich colours of Persian miniatures and was fascinated by the grotesque aspects he perceived in science (particularly natural history) and also in popular culture. In 1941 he met Robert Motherwell, whose interests as a painter also included Symbolist literature and Surrealism. Through his friendship with Motherwell and other artists such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, all of whom shared an interest in automatism, he became associated with ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM and his first one-man exhibition (1944) was at the gallery most closely involved with the nascent movement, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century. His work always remained at a tangent, however, to that of his colleagues, even during the 1940s, when they shared concerns with dreams, primitive ritual, mystery and terror.
Baziotes’s mature style was announced in works such as The Dwarf (1947; New York, MOMA), in which he applied thin layers of paint with dappled brushstrokes, suggesting simultaneously a watery environment, stained glass and jewels. Inhabiting this dream world is a clumsy green monster, described by the artist as both horrible and humorous, which combines the deadly eye of a lizard with the jagged teeth of a crocodile. The strangely inactive creature, like so many in Baziotes’s work, evokes moods of reverie, fear and pity.
In his subsequent work, Baziotes recoiled from the more extreme developments of Abstract Expressionism, shunning its emphasis both on gesture and on dramatic large scale in favour of a less overtly emotional style that elaborated the sense of fantasy of his early pictures. His paintings of the 1950s, such as Pompeii (1955; New York, MOMA), were dominated by a mood of stillness, by meandering shapes suggestive of simple organisms, and by Classical references prompted by his investigation of his Mediterranean heritage. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1949 to 1952, and at Hunter College, New York, from 1952 until his death. [Robert Saltonstall Mattison. "Baziotes, William." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T007076.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
