William Baziotes (1912-1963)
Untitled, 1946
William Baziotes was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied painting at the National Academy of Design, graduating in 1936. He was employed by the WPA through 1941. His first one-man exhibition was held in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery. He was a founding member, along with Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, David Hare and Barnett Newman, of the Subjects of the Artist School in New York. After his death in 1963, a memorial exhibition which traveled the country was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Baziotes’ work reflects an interest in Automatism (tapping the unconscious for the creation of images), Surrealism, and the art of Miro, Matta and Arp. He developed a personal vocabulary of abstract symbols which often have a rounded, lifelike character. These “biomorphs” are shapes that suggest a living organism but do not consciously represent one. Paintings from the mid-1940s, like Untitled from 1946, represent the biomorphs as seen through a window or doorway, or as places on a platform or stage, suggesting space despite the flatness of the composition. In his mature works, the forms are magnified to occupy the entire canvas, and the surrounding framework disappears. Baziotes’ paintings represent a synthesis of Surrealist subject and Cubist style.
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