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Walter Darby Bannard is a hedonist, and proud of it. He believes that the role of art is to give pleasure. It’s not meant to be an intellectual exercise, or political propaganda, or even an illustration of something that it’s not (though he has plenty of room in his lexicon for representational painters, past and present, whose work pleasures the eye, regardless of what else it may or may not do).

February 25, 2014, New York, New York -- Edwin Ruda passed away at age 91.   Ruda was born in New York City in 1922 and grew up in the East Bronx.  He graduated from Cornell University in 1947, having interrupted his studies to enlist in the navy during World War II.  In 1949 he received a Master of Arts from Columbia University and spent the following decade studying in Mexico City, teaching at the University of Texas, and completing a Master of Fine Arts at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Washington Art Matters II:  1940s-1980s, opened Saturday, Jan. 25 through Sunday, March 16, is a second opportunity to revisit Washington DC’s most celebrated artists of the 20^th century.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, February 11, 2014 – Berry Campbell is pleased to announce, Walter Darby Bannard: Dragon Water, featuring sixteen paintings from the 1970s. Bannard, a leader in the development of Color Field Painting in the late 1950s, has been committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over five decades. During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, he joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella and the critic and art historian Michael Fried, in conversations that expanded aesthetic definitions and led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art.

Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Edwin Ruda: The Band Paintings, including sixteen paintings and works on paper from 1969 to 1972.

Unafraid to step beyond stylistic boundaries, Edwin Ruda consistently probed the incongruities and connections between minimalism and the geometric and lyrical modes of abstraction.  Ruda’s “band” paintings embody his efforts to reconcile these two divergent forms. The result is an elegant, radiant body of work. Loosening the flow of his paint, Ruda introduced pure and translucent bands of colors that are rarely part of minimalist statements.  He then worked through the resulting contradictions without allowing structure or formlessness to dominate.

Joining Forces

A true "boomerang," Ken Greenleaf grew up in Damariscotta and returned to Maine after having lived in New York for 20 years.  He has had solo and group shows at various New York galleries, including Tibor de Nagy, and in 1994 participated in a two-person show at the Farnsworth Art Museum with Dozier Bell, who is now his wife.

What are the results when artists use charcoal as their main medium, instead of as a basic learning tool or preparatory medium? Paul Sattler, director of Skidmore's Schick Galleryanswers that question with a new show, "Charcoal!"

What are the results when artists use charcoal as their main medium, instead of as a basic learning tool or preparatory medium? Paul Sattler, director of Skidmore's Schick Galleryanswers that question with a new show, "Charcoal!"

COLOR! I’m excited to talk about a show I just saw at the new Berry Campbell gallery in New York: William Perehudoff: Color Field Paintings from the 1980s.

It’s delightful, though not surprising, that a New York art gallery would choose an abstract painter from the Canadian prairies for their opening show. There are actually intriguing historic ties between the art communities of Saskatchewan and New York City.  Read on.

Berry Campbell is a new gallery, formed by the partnership of Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, two bright young graduates of Spanierman (which has concurrently relocated to West 55th Street, near 12th Avenue). 

For their inaugural exhibition, Berry Campbell has chosen to feature William Perehudoff, a Canadian color-field painter who was born in 1919 and died only last February at the ripe age of 93. He is well-known in Canada, though less known here.