This fall 2003, Platt Fine Art will open Harold Weston: Paintings and Works on Paper by an American Modernist, an exhibition which traces the artist's career from his early Expressionist landscapes of the Adirondacks, to his later abstract compositions of nature known as the Stone Series (seen below).
Over
20 pieces will be available for
purchase, including "The Purple
Hat" (seen above), which was
exhibited in the very first Whitney
Museum Biennial in 1932.
Weston rose to prominence when Newman Montross, an important New York dealer who promoted and pioneered modernist works in his gallery in the 1910s and 1920s, decided to mount Weston?s first solo show in 1922. The exhibition was a critical and commercial success, and sparked what was to become the first of numerous one-man shows held at Montross Galleries throughout the decade.
Weston?s career continued to rise, when in the late 1920s and 1930s he received valuable exposure and support through his relationship with Duncan Phillips, the influential art collector and critic. 1928 marked the year when Phillips purchased the first in what would eventually become a collection of 34 works by the artist. During the 1930s alone the Phillips Memorial Gallery, in Washington, D.C., (now the Phillips Collection) held four all-Weston shows - in 1930, 1931, 1932 and 1939.
Weston?s contribution to humanity was not to be confined to artistic expression alone. In 1943 he became the moving force behind the creation of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. And during that same period he founded a citizen?s organization called Food For Freedom, which reached a membership of over 60 million during WWII. In 1953 he was the primary organizer of the International Association of Plastic Arts, later the International Association of Art, an affiliate of Unesco. He was also a cofounder, and for ten years the chairman, of the National Council on the Arts and Government, and played a significant role in the formation of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, which later became the national endowments.
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| The 1960s marked Weston?s return to painting full-time. He delved entirely into abstraction. This culminated in his Stone Series (completed between 1968-1972), which resulted in seventy-six gouache paintings on color paper, inspired by a collection of stones from the Gaspe` Peninsula.
Said Lloyd Goodrich in the Congressional Record, June, 1972: His style evolved in these late works (the Stone Series) into a highly individual kind of abstraction? to achieve pure design - and design which owed nothing to any other artist, an expression of his personal feeling about his world and the universe of nature.
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Tibetan Dawn
Gouache on paper, 1969
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| Thus it is with great pleasure that Platt Fine Art is able to offer its clientele such a fine collection of works by such a unique and significant 20th century Amercian Artist.
----A major retrospective of Weston's work is slated to run for two years, 2005-2007, at the Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, NY.----
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