The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

By the time he quit Madrid for New York in 1936—the Spanish Civil War raging behind him—Esteban Vicente was already an accomplished sculptor and painter on familiar terms with the School of Paris. Like so many artists coming of age in Europe in the era of Art Deco, he moved comfortably among French and Spanish artistic and literary circles, which included the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, the future film director Luis Buñuel, and Pablo Picasso. In the 1920s, Vicente had experimented with figurative painting, portraiture, still life, and Post-Impressionist landscape. After settling in the United States, where he would become a citizen, he entered another period of prolonged experiment, spending much of the late 1930s and early 1940s considering the achievements of Picasso and Cubism (especially collage and semiabstraction), and the geometric, nonobjective abstraction of Mondrian—all the while moving in the artistic circle of the nascent New York School. By 1950, Vicente’s work was selected by Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg for their landmark exhibition of contemporary painting, Talent 1950, at the Samuel Kootz Gallery. He would also participate in Leo Castelli’s watershed Ninth Street Show at 60 East Ninth Street the following year. Vicente’s work at this time constituted a coloristic, carefully structured variant on the compositional methods of Synthetic Cubism, in which forms of color seemed to hover and shift in a shallow field of evenly distributed light. Vicente’s unique idiom of “chromatic abstraction” evolved toward the 1960s into a form of Color Field painting; Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler represented its heroic, or large-scale, perfection, while Vicente was widely admired for his intimate mastery of the genre. Vicente maintained a vigorous teaching schedule, helping to found the New York Studio School in 1964 and instructing students at Black Mountain College, Princeton, New York University, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley. He and his wife, Harriet, visited the East End of Long Island early in his debut with the New York School, eventually buying an old Bridgehampton farmhouse in 1964 and converting a barn into a studio boasting clerestory windows. (He strove for a similar even-tempered illumination in his work.) Vicente has been celebrated by the Spanish government for his distinguished career in both his native and his adopted lands, and is permanently memorialized in a solo museum and cultural center—the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente—in his native Segovia. [Gregory Galligan]