“Baziotes’ paintings are the vivification of his life dedicated to the spirit so defined. Insheathed in an aura of wonderment, they speak of the torments of a mind at its highest emotional pitch, mining the rarest gemstones hidden deep within the psyche, working them through multiple layers toward the surface, reaching toward the light which glimmers faintly from the most distant star.”
Before a cerulean illusion of rippling aquatic depth, two amorphous figures emerge in William Baziotes’s Figures in Net from 1948, an ethereal example of the artist’s painterly penchant for the Abstract and Surrealist sublime. One of the most mysterious figures of the Abstract Expressionist circle working in New York at midcentury, Baziotes dedicated his painterly output to recreating dream-like states, often through biomorphic visual metaphors that resemble deep sea life-forms or amoebic cells. Combining nature and artifact, organism and psyche, the present work perfectly expresses Baziotes’s artistic tendency for introspection and imagination as it invites the viewer to wander through its marine lattice in the profound search of a deeper truth.
Baziotes's 1940s Canvases in Museum Collections
In the 1930s, Baziotes frequently exhibited with a coterie of painters that included Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, all of whom dedicated their practice to principles of expressionism and abstraction. By 1940, however, when Baziotes befriended Roberto Matta, who introduced him to the tenets of European Surrealism, the artist began to espouse the psychic techniques of automatism, formulating them into his own abstractionist practice. Baziotes painted without prior compositional planning and instead manifested visuals from his wandering hand, unveiling and embracing the impulses of his subconscious. Seeking to intimate the phantoms of his own unconscious on canvas, Baziotes developed a rich visual lexicon of his own that was populated with the mythic yet organic biomorphic forms conjured from his imagination. As he reflected, “It is the mysterious that I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt” (The artist cited in “Notes on Painting,” It Is, 1959).
Right: Roberto Matta, The Onyx of Electra, 1944. Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Art Resource, NY. Art © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
An intimately delicate composition, Figures in Net sees Baziotes move beyond the grand scale and action-based gestures of Abstract Expressionism: here, white curvilinear lines ellipse across the canvas in undulant routes, forming a “net” as the title suggests that sinks through shadowy depths into the melancholy background of murky indigo haze. Drifting into focus before this atmosphere, two abstract elemental figures that luminate in ghostly white and bright yellow simultaneously recall oceanic creatures and otherworldly spirits. Fluid and ominous, the liquid movements of Baziotes’s brushwork in the present work seem to enter the quiet realm of dreams as they maneuver through the marine mysteries of the deep sea: as the artist states, “It is there when a few brushstrokes start me off on a labyrinthian journey that I am led to a more real reality” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Newport Harbor Art Museum, William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1978, p. 44).
Executed at the apotheosis of Baziotes’s mature style in 1948, Figures in Net is a consummate example of the artist’s mystical and psychological practice that blends the fundamental tenets of both Abstract Expressionism and European Surrealism. In posthumous praise of Baziotes’s career, which he dedicated to matters of the spirit and psyche, critic Grace Glueck wrote for the New York Times in 2001: “Baziotes seems to have reached the height of his powers in work from the mid-1940’s to the late 1950’s. His paintings from the mid-1930’s…are more densely packed with colorful bits and pieces of monsters, animals, fish and arcane imaginings, tied together by webby lines. Their garrulous vivacity has its charms, but the later works, with sparer, more intense imagery, have a fluid, poetic eloquence that these busy early paintings lack” (Grace Glueck cited in “Art in Review; William Baziotes,” The New York Times, October 2001).
