William Baziotes was an American painter usually considered an Abstract Expressionist. His abstract canvases depicting various shapes were often influenced by biomorphism and Symbolist poetry. Baziotes’s artworks are also close to surrealism.
Background
William Baziotes was born on June 11, 1912, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. He was a son of Angelos Baziotes and Stella Eliopoulos.
Soon after his birth, the family relocated to Reading, Pennsylvania where the young boy was raised.
Education
William Baziotes received his first drawing lessons in his youth attending the evening art courses while working.
Later, encouraged by his friend, a poet Byron Vazsakas who introduced him to Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets, Baziotes went to New York City in order to pursue his artistic training.
He entered the National Academy of Design in 1933 and spent three years there. Among his teachers were Charles Curran, Ivan Olinsky, Gifford Beal and Leon Kroll. While at the Academy, William also explored the art of the Old Masters.
The start of William Baziotes’s career can be counted from his work at the Case Glass Company from 1931 to 1933 where he antiqued glass and did other routine tasks.
In 1936 he joined the Works Progress Administration of the Federal Art Project teaching at Queens College of the City University of New York for a couple of years. After, he took part at the WPA Easel Project from 1938-1940. During this period, Baziotes got acquainted with many Surrealist artists, including Roberto Matta and Robert Motherwell who became his close friend.
William Baziotes presented his artworks at the group exhibition ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ held in New York City in 1942. This one was followed by the artist’s solo show at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery two years later and by the show at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in 1946.
William Baziotes was an active participant of the Abstract Expressionism movement attending the galleries, schools and clubs related to the style. In 1948, with the support of his colleagues David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, Baziotes opened the school called ‘Subjects of the Artist’. In addition to other things, it was a place for American and European artists where they had the possibility to share their views and interests.
William Baziotes devoted the last ten years of his life to teaching. So, he taught art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the City University of New York, the People's Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art, New York University in Manhattan, the City University of New York and Hunter College. In 1962, he participated at Sydney Janis's exhibition titled ‘Ten American Painters’.
William Baziotes believed that color, shape and paint application used in art should elicit feelings and emotions.
Quotations:
"And when the demagogues of art call on you to make the social art, the intelligible art, the good art, spit down on them and go back to your dreams, the world, and your mirror."
"The emphasis on flora, fauna and beings brings forth those strange memories and psychic feelings that mystify and fascinate all of us."
"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."
"My whole intention in painting is to make a thing poetical . . . when I paint, I do not consider myself an abstractionist in the sense that I'm trying to create beautiful forms that fit together like a puzzle. The things in my painting are intended to strike something that is an emotional involvement - that has to do with the human personality and all the mysteries of life, not simply colors or abstract balances. To, it's all reality."
"Each beginning suggests something. Once I sense the suggestion, I begin to paint intuitively. The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real. As I work, or when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Baziotes is unique in that the spatial organization of the whole painting implies a dense medium, like water, as well as evoking reminiscences of particular organisms. This kind of space becomes scenically expansive in 1952. developing after paintings of 1950 in which marine life is one term in an ambiguous image." Lawrence Alloway, English art critic and curator
Interests
ancient Greek art and sculpture
Writers
Charles Baudelaire
Artists
Joan Miró
Connections
William Baziotes married Ethel Copstein in April 1941.