William Baziotes

William Baziotes (1912-1963)

The son of Greek immigrants, the artist grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. He moved to New York City in 1933 at the age of twenty-one. Baziotes studied for three years under Leon Kroll at the National Academy of Design, and from 1936 to 41 was employed by the Works Progress Administration as a teacher and as a member of the Easel Painting Project. Throughout his career, Baziotes consistently emphasized his role as an educator within the New York art world as a means of cultivating his own creative ideas and temperament. He would continue to value his role both as a part of a larger artistic community and an educator as a means of cultivating his own creative ideas and temperament. In the early 1940s, Baziotes--along with the painters Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell--became profoundly influenced by the automatist methods propagated by older, expatriate Surrealist artists, such as Roberto Matta Echaurren. In collaboration with a handful of pioneering Americans, including Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, Baziotes began producing a personalized vocabulary of shapes conceived as the outcome of a dialogue with material experienced within the unconscious regions of the mind.

During a period of intense self-examination in 1941-42, Baziotes relied on automatic drawing (rather than painting) to develop his ambiguous assortment of imagery, which in some ways suggests living organisms but has no specific identity. In 1944 such organic, biomorphic components were highly regarded by visitors to his first solo exhibition, at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. Over the next few years Baziotes adopted a muted color scheme and included fewer individual compositional elements. By the mid-1940s he had magnified the main figural element of each of his paintings so that it overshadowed an abstract pictorial field offset by a variety of supplementary linear elements. Although he drew the contours of his forms in a deliberate way, Baziotes increasingly softened their outlines and represented their surfaces so that they appeared only partially differentiated from the background, as if they were moving in and out of different states of consciousness. Hence, these artworks were (and still are) often envisioned as mirror reflections of, or windows to, a timeless and universal realm of the unconscious wherein the past, present, and future cohabitate.