William Baziotes
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WILLIAM BAZIOTES was born in Pittsburgh in 1912 and grew up in Reading in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. He went to New York in 1933 and studied at the National Academy of Design, 1933-36. Quite as important as formal study in his development have been his contacts with his fellow painters and his own exploration of the work of artists he particularly admires. Among these he has named Piero della Francesca, Titian, Rembrandt, Utamaro, Rubens, Velasquez, Goya, Fragonard, Ingres, Corot, Seurat, Renoir, Bonnard, Matisse and Miro. He says: "The sense of artistic communion is important to my work. . . . There is always unconscious collaboration among artists. The painter who imagines himself a Robinson Crusoe is either a primitive or a fool. The common goal is difficult to describe, but I do know it is not a certain universal subject matter. However, in the best practitioners of abstract painting, I sense the goal when I see the artist has had the courage to live in his time and in his own fashion. And when he has courage, there is style in his work. The subject matter in his work can be the tremors of an unstable world or the joy of a summer day. Both are equally valid. Each artist must follow his own star."
In 1936 Baziotes joined the teaching division of the New York City WPA Federal Art Project. After two years of teaching he transferred to the easel project where he worked during 1938-41. In 1944 in New York he had his first one-man show; he had had a oneman show every year since then, except 1945 and 1949, and was included in Fifteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952. He was represented in twenty museums throughout the United States and in Tel Aviv, Israel. He teached at Hunter College, New York.
Baziotes: Painting, for me, is an endless falling in love with life. For me, the visual is everything. To be endlessly surprised. To look at the world with primitive eyes. And then, to go to my canvas with the truth of intuition.
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