Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction

Wednesday, 26 October 2005 11:53

PORTLAND, ME. - Abstract, colorful works, many inspired by Maine’s coast, will be on view in the exhibition Murray Hantman: From Image to Abstraction, at the Portland Museum of Art. With a career that spanned much of the 20th century, Murray Hantman participated fully in the energy and innovation that characterized the American, and specifically, New York, art world during his lifetime. The exhibition will feature approximately 45 paintings and works on paper, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection. Like many of his contemporaries, Hantman’s work was shaped by the times in which he lived—by the exhilarating sense of the potential of art in the modern era coupled with the harsher realities of American life during the Great Depression and World War II. Those forces combined in Murray Hantman to create an artist profoundly committed to art as an agent of social good and spiritual renewal. As a painter for more than 60 years, and a teacher for 30 of those, he devoted himself to the nurture of creativity and the practice of art. Hantman’s formal training took place at New York’s progressive Arts Students League, where he had the opportunity to work on two major public mural projects—assisting on a cycle of murals depicting the history of commerce for the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh and working with Thomas Hart Benton on the America Today murals created for the New School for Social Research in New York. Hantman carried those experiences west with him when, while living in southern California for a period in the early 1930s, he joined David Alfaro Siquieros’s “Bloc of Painters” and worked alongside that great Mexican muralist on several outspoken public paintings. During the war years he began taking painting trips to coastal New England and Canada. In 1945, he visited Monhegan, a small island 17 miles off the coast of Maine, for the first time. Captivated by the island’s dramatic rocky coast and expanses of surrounding sky and sea, he returned to paint there for 30 summer seasons. Like many of his generation, Hantman rejected explicit narrative in his paintings for a more primal expression of experience. Even as he moved away from representation into abstraction, nature remained the touchstone for his art. Using what he described as a process of subtraction, Hantman worked within the limits of simple forms—rectangles, circles, dots and lines—found everywhere in nature and concentrated on the seemingly inexhaustible potential of color. Ultimately, his goal was to convey a sense of latent energy through the dynamic juxtaposition of colors. While his paintings from this period were largely inspired by summers in Maine, they clearly show an awareness of developments in the larger world of art, from the rise of Abstract Expressionism to the development of styles concerned with optical perception.

---

Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~