The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Raymond Hendler was a Philadelphia born, action painter, whose mature work began in the ferment of postwar Paris. Supported by the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, exhibited at the Musee D’Art Moderne and was one of the founding members of Galerie Huit (the first American cooperative gallery in Europe). Through association with André Breton and his circle, Hendler was exposed to surrealism and its intended program - the liberation of the human spirit.

He credited his friend, the Australian sculptor, Robert Klippel, with support at a crucial moment that led to a career-defining breakthrough; an activity that involved the use of the automatic and the unconscious, he would later refer to as “serious doodling and judicious scribbling.” His move to progressive, non-objective painting would lead to ostracism by many in the American art colony and engender a productive friendship with the French-Canadian tachist painter, Jean Paul Riopelle.

With his return from Paris in 1951, Hendler was introduced to the burgeoning New York art scene. There he met and befriended many of the important figures of an emerging vanguard. He was a voting member of the New York Artists Club from 1951 until its end in 1957. A close friendship with the painter, Franz Kline, would significantly inform his work.

Throughout the fifties, he participated in numerous exhibitions including; “an American, one-man premiere,” at the Dublin Galleries in Philadelphia, “fresh from Paris” and historic invitationals at the Camino, March and Stable Galleries in New York. For the period of the 1960’s he was represented by Rose Fried.

In 1962 for a one-man show at the Rose Fried Gallery, Franz Kline, wrote in a forward for the exhibition catalogue, “Since first I saw Hendler’s paintings in 1952 they have developed into a larger simpler form arriving at a personally abstract image controlled within a painted space. The direct austere design and color complexes paint the image without undue nuances - with clarity and mature independence.”

In 1963, Hendler received the Longview Foundation Purchase Award, juried by Willem de Kooning, Thomas Hess, Philip Guston, Harold Rosenberg and David Smith. He taught at the University of Minnesota from 1968 until he retired, a full professor, in 1984. Having made several trips to the Hamptons to visit art world friends, through the years, he relocated with his wife, the painter, Mary Rood, in 1986 - building a house in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods - where he lived and painted until his death in 1998. [Patrick Mealey]

www.raymondhendler.com