Robert Moskowitz & Myron Stout

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present paintings by Robert Moskowitz and Myron Stout. This is our second exhibition of each artist’s work since announcing representation of their estates (Moskowitz’s first solo show opened during his lifetime). Though they belonged to different generations, there are undeniable parallels between Robert Moskowitz and Myron Stout. They each divided time between New York and historic artist communities—Stout in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Motherwell; Moskowitz on Cape Bretton Island with Joan Jonas, Philip Glass, Richard Serra, and Robert Frank. While studying under Hans Hofmann in the late 1940s, Myron Stout developed a style that bridged Abstract Expressionism with the anticipation of Minimalism, but existed outside of both. Robert Moskowitz was a prominent figure of the 1970s New Image Painters group that arose out of the same movements, yet his own painting style also defied easy categorization. Both artists are perhaps more readily defined by their slow, almost obsessive practices of repetition and refinement—an almost ascetic approach to painting that allowed them to find meaning within their own simplified vocabularies. Ranging in date from 1994 to 2009, the Moskowitz paintings feature archetypal imagery from history and art that are reduced to their most elemental forms and suspended in vast, anchorless expanses. Subtle variations in tone and texture are constructed with passages of stylized, expressive brushwork, giving a quiet energy and tangibility to the otherwise stark language of these hard-edged, geometric compositions. Ranging in date from ca. 1947–1953, the Stouts belong to a group of rarely shown paintings described by Henry Geldzahler as the "conjectural pathways" that led to the biomorphic black-and-white series for which he is best known. It was at this time that Stout moved to Provincetown and began making graphite and Conté crayon drawings of the landscape—working directly from nature both figuratively and abstractly. Their sweeping gestures of rich, layered colors capture a sense of hypnotic movement that echoes the ritualistic nature of the artist’s practice. Robert Moskowitz (b. 1935, Brooklyn, d. 2024, Manhattan) had his first appearance as an artist at age 26 when he was included in the seminal 1961 MoMA exhibition The Art of Assemblage, a landmark show that helped clarify how modern art had used material and process to break rules and create new genres. In 1989, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC mounted a major retrospective of his work, which travelled to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is in numerous institutional collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Myron Stout (b. 1908, Denton, Texas; d. 1987, Chatham, Massachusetts) only participated in a handful of exhibitions during his career, but his 1980 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York solidified him as a key figure in the history of abstract art. He was also the subject of a retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (1977), and has had solo exhibitions at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (1998), and Dia Art Foundation, Bridgehampton (1990). His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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