Press Release

Spanierman Gallery LLC at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on May 22, 2008 of An East End Tradition: Six Artists . Featured in the exhibition are the works of six noted painters whose association with the East End of Long Island reflects the unique impact of an area that has been so deeply inspiring for many generations of artists.

Attention to Betty Parsons's esteemed position as a gallery owner has often overshadowed a consideration of her own career as an artist, but throughout the years that she championed many of the leading Abstract Expressionist artists of her era (Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman), she continued to paint and sculpt, creating a compelling and original body of work that has only recently received critical acclaim.   Transcending the often purely formal and dogmatic issues that preoccupied many artists of the day, Parsons, who was born in 1900, used an innovative approach to color and form to express her observations on a wide range of topics-from phenomena in nature, to Native American and Chinese culture, to the cosmos, to her own childhood. While Parsons actively ran her gallery on New York 's 57 th Street , from 1959 onwards, she also maintained a house-studio designed by the architect Tony Smith that overlooked the Long Island Sound. Among the oils in the exhibition, Untitled (#5020) (1962) echoes her experience of the East End; its simplified composition consists of large shapes in glowing colors floating within an atmosphere of white translucency, their forms and relationships conjuring the seashore, water, fossils, shells, or ancient writings. The show also features several examples of Parson's original sculpture. Painting brightly striped patterns on pieces of wood that washed up on the beach near her home in Southold, Long Island -including parts of houses, docks, boats, and signs-Parsons created assemblages evoking the human past of her materials, their lost narratives and former lives.

The tradition of abstraction on Long Island that Parsons fostered was also reinforced by the married artists Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, both born in 1904, who beginning in 1948 lived in the large home they built at Montauk Point . Gertrude Greene is represented in the exhibition by collages and drawings from the 1930s, in which she combined aspects of biomorphic Surrealism with a constructivist architectonic sensibility as well as by the works of her later years on Long Island , when she came under the influence of Abstract Expressionism. In the latter works, using a palette knife, she created richly textured, sensuously colored surfaces in which the evidence of the pictorial structure creates an underlying tension.

Balcomb Greene, who outlived his wife by thirty-four years, was a strong public promoter of American abstraction and held an important role in its widespread acceptance. In Woman and Man by the Sea (1972), Greene brought abstract principles to a figural subject, treating his forms as planes of light, shadow, and movement.

Born in 1918, Charlotte Park who studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts, moved to The Springs, East Hampton , in 1949, along with her husband, fellow artist James Brooks. Park's dynamic allover style of composition, with its rich repertory of abstract shapes, made its appearance in the early 1950s. However, like many of the women artists who were at the cutting edge of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Park received little recognition during those years; indeed, her work was almost unknown until after the death of her husband in 1992, and its first full examination only occurred in 2002, when the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, featured it in a solo exhibition. The show and subsequent attention to Park have revealed her personal approach to Abstract Expressionism, in which she combined irregular shapes and runic strokes of light colors to form a reductive painterly vocabulary with which she referenced signs of the ocean, bay, and countryside of Long Island . Her approach is exemplified in an untitled work from the 1960s in which abutting planes of contrasting brilliant and muted tones express effects of sunlight, water, and air.

Another artist lured by the East End was Jimmy Ernst, who settled in East Hampton in 1969. Born in Cologne , Germany , in 1920, Ernst had a long and eventful career before this move. The son of Max Ernst, a leading figure in European Surrealism, Jimmy knew many of the most important artists of his time during his youth. Inspired to paint when he viewed Picasso's Guernica at the 1937 Paris World's Fair, he began his career a year later when his parents sent him to New York to escape the war. Mature beyond his years, Ernst had a familiarity with the avant-garde that led Peggy Guggenheim to make him the first director of her Art of This Century Gallery in 1942, when he was only twenty-two. He was included along with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and others, in the famous photograph of the New York School that appeared in Life magazine in January 1951. His own work reflected his penchant for experimentation and his consummate skills as a technician. In the 1950s he created a pictorial treatise on science. A trip to Europe in the 1960s led him to produce a series of works inspired by the ribbing, vaulting, and stained glass of Gothic cathedrals. These influences are evoked in Before It's Too Late (1976), in which he divided the canvas in vertical planes of red and blue, the striations in the background creating a feeling of colored glass, while a geometric pattern is activated across the surface. The work's title perhaps derives from the Transatlantic journey of Ernst and his father, while also referencing the tragedy that befell his mother, who died at Auschwitz -for whom it was too late to make the crossing.

The legacy of Jackson Pollock was perpetuated by the artist Dan Christensen until his untimely death in 2007. Born in 1942, Christensen began to paint in his teens after seeing the works of Pollock on a trip to Denver from his home in Nebraska . After receiving his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1964, Christensen moved to New York , where he rose to fame as part of a group of young artists who revived painting after the prevailing era of Minimalism. Experimenting with new painting techniques, Christensen received critical praise for his use of spray paint guns and window-wiper squeegees to produce compositions that emanated from his media but that were largely not predetermined. In Dolan (1988), among several works by Christensen in the exhibition, the looped spray lines are overlapped and saturated; while the result invokes Minimalism and Color Field painting, its gestural strength retains the valorization of the handmade and the direct engagement of the artist in his work. For Christensen, East Hampton, where he lived during the last phase of his life, inspired him, as did the East End for many other artists, to produce an individualistic work often prohibited by the competition and congestion of New York City studio life.