Sundaram Tagore Gallery is pleased to present a wide-ranging exhibition of paintings by Robert Natkin (1930–2010), one of the foremost American abstract colorist painters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. It is the first time Robert Natkin’s work has been shown in Singapore. The exhibition, which brings together canvases spanning five decades, is a rare opportunity to explore the range and depth of this prolific artist’s creative output. The exhibition was organized in conjunction with the artist’s estate, which Sundaram Tagore Gallery represents worldwide.
Robert Natkin was a Chicago-born artist associated with the Color Field and Lyrical Abstraction painters. His hues are shamelessly seductive, whether deployed in vertical columns in his Apollo paintings, spread in gauzy veils in his Bath series, or strikingly textured in the Bern pictures. On his canvases, paint creates a seemingly infinite space in which iconographic details appear to hover or float through illusory depths.
Robert Natkin was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. Today, his work is in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Robert Natkin: A Better Place travels to Singapore after debuting at Sundaram Tagore Gallery New York. The exhibition will subsequently travel to Sundaram Tagore Gallery London gallery, a multilevel space in the heart of the city currently under renovation, which is slated to open in the spring.
Natkin was born into a poor and unhappy Russian-Jewish family in Chicago during the Great Depression. He would transcend his traumatic upbringing, often finding refuge in the color and splendor of the movies. He had thoughts of becoming a commercial illustrator, but on encountering a book about Paul Klee he knew immediately that he wanted to be a painter.
In 1948, Natkin enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, and moved to New York in 1959. Fearing the disordered, insecure existence he’d known in childhood, Natkin kept his distance from other artists, particularly the Abstract Expressionists whose fabled self-destructive behavior unsettled him. For Natkin, art represented the means to psychological fulfillment and a secure middle-class life. He painted almost compulsively, and within the year found himself part of the Young America show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1969 had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The following year, Natkin moved to rural Connecticut, where he built a studio overlooking the countryside and over the ensuing forty years continued to experiment with color and form.
Natkin’s painterly journey can be understood through its distinct and loosely phased series as he accumulated years of psychotherapy and read and looked at art voraciously. They reveal his drive for redemption not just through introspection, but by consistently forging new stylistic syntheses.
FEATURED SERIES
The vigorous, gestural brushwork of Natkin’s early abstractions reflects the seismic impact of the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whose work he encountered in an article about Abstract Expressionism in Life magazine in 1949. Natkin also found inspiration in French artists Matisse and Bonnard, among others in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1948–1952.
In New York, Natkin’s vigorously abstract paintings took on more rectilinear qualities, decisively so with his Apollo series, characterized by loose vertical bands of color. The series began in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, based on a sculptural fragment in the Louvre, with its final imperative: “You have to change your life.” Named after the Greek god of the sun, the arts and healing, the Apollos established for Natkin the purpose of his art as a means of transformation for self and society.
The Apollo series was long-lived, spanning the 1960s and revived in the mid-1970s. The later instances incorporated Natkin’s distinctive technique of applying acrylic paint with a sponge covered in cloths of various textures, which he discovered in 1971. The technique increased his productivity and transformed his aesthetic.
The pointillistic, gauzy effect of this technique came into its own in the more muted, diaphanous visions of the Bath series, so named for the English city where Natkin was to have an exhibition. The subtle, atmospheric nature of the Bath paintings are akin to his earlier Intimate Lighting series, which ran through much of the 1970s, and were described by British art critic Peter Fuller as possessing hints of portraiture in their central focus and inspired by Cubism in the clearly applied blocks of sponge-and-cloth-painting.
Natkin’s Straight Edge and Step paintings emerged from a period in the mid-1960s when he was preparing to teach a course on color at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and read Josef Albers’ theories on color interaction. They also channel the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, his love of jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and the dynamic grid-pattern streets of New York.
He explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the Field Mouse series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, by which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resembled microscopic views of teeming organisms. For him, they were also complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a more romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York City to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.
In 1977, Natkin produced the Bern series, named for the Swiss capital where the Klee Foundation is located and where Natkin spent many hours among Paul Klee’s works. In this series, he uses more sharply delineated shapes against expansive fields of intense color. Perhaps the boldest colors and shapes appear in the 1980s in the Hitchcock series, an homage to the great director and the movie-theater origins of his artistic journey. Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalytic themes where dark secrets often drive the narrative, and his charging of the carefully crafted scenery and props with menacing symbolism appealed to Natkin.
Robert Natkin died in 2010, leaving behind a body of work that is life-affirming and sensual—his paintings revel in visual delight, Hollywood Technicolor, intricate surface effects, and a luminous optimism. Writing in Art & Antiques magazine in 2015, the American critic Carter Ratcliff, in an essay titled The Dappled Infinite, described Natkin’s oeuvre as “at once gorgeously complex and serenely at odds with prevailing trends.”
Robert Natkin: A Better Place is accompanied by a full-color printed book with an essay by Dr. Marius Kwint. It is the first major publication about the artist since British critic Peter Fuller’s monograph Robert Natkin (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1981).
COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS
Since 1957, Robert Natkin’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. He had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1969); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1981); and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (1982).
His work was featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1960), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1979 and 1980), and The Jewish Museum, New York (1982). During the 1970s he had five solo exhibitions at the esteemed André Emmerich Gallery, New York.
Natkin’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
