Date: Fri 25-Jun-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: SARAH

Quick Words:

Wigmore-Dabo

Full Text:

D. Wigmore Fine Art Exhibits Leon Dabo

(with 2 cuts)

NEW YORK CITY -- D. Wigmore Art will be the exclusive agent for the estate of

Leon Dabo (1865-1960). The gallery has selected paintings from the estate that

offer collectors a complete retrospective of Leon Dabo's works. "Leon Dabo: A

Retrospective" will be on view until July 30. All of the works in the

exhibition are for sale.

The earliest works in the selection are a group of 16 Hudson River Valley

landscapes painted between 1904 and 1911. These works represent Leon Dabo's

exploration of the aesthetics of his friend and teacher, James Abbott McNeill

Whistler (1834-1903).

Dabo combined Whistler's credo of "Art for Art's Sake" with the soft-focus,

romantic pictorialism of art photography at the turn of the century, and began

his exploration of light and atmosphere in these early Tonalist paintings.

Dabo's landscapes along the Hudson River demonstrate how the Tonalists

continued the Hudson River School's preoccupation with capturing light and

atmosphere. The use of Hudson River scenery also allows one to trace the

stylistic developments in American landscape painting (Romanticism to Luminism

then to Tonalism) that occurred between 1840 and 1890.

Tonalist paintings from this period of Leon Dabo's work are owned by the

national Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. ("Evening on the Hudson,"

1908), and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City ("The Cloud," 1912).

Dabo participated in the 1910 exhibition of the "Independents" organized by

members of the New York Eight, and was one of the principle organizers of the

1913 Armory Show, so he was aware of international developments in style

relating to form, color and light. His travels abroad between 1917 and 1920 as

a member of the American Financial Mission to the Allies allowed him to meet

other important artists and to study their work.

As Dabo was already interested in still life painting through his work with

John La Farge (1835-1910) in the 1880s and 1890s, the artists that attracted

his attention were recognized masters of still life painting, most notably

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and Odilon Redon (1840-1916).

This led to the next development in Dabo's work: the exploration of color,

form and artificial lighting using still life as his subject. The still life

subjects of 1912-1937 fuse the ideas of still life painting Dabo learned from

La Farge, Fantin-Latour and Redon. The exhibition offers nine still life

paintings, many of which were exhibited in 1933 at M. Knoedler and Company,

New York.

In 1937 Leon Dabo returned to the brushy style he had explored between 1900

and 1903, seeing in his early Impressionist-inspired canvases a new approach

to his lifelong effort to master light by harnessing it to texture and color.

From 1937 until his death in 1960, Leon Dabo strove to realize new color

sensations in his marines and landscapes painted in America and France.

Attracted to their non-literal color schemes and loose form, Dabo drew

inspiration from the work the French Fauves had done between 1905 and 1908.

The landscapes and marines of this period exhibit modulations of warm and cool

colors. In the final phase of his style, Dabo used color and texture in a new

way as he searched for the rhythms of light in color that are the essence of

his subjects.

Because French Fauvism was both the catalyst and the example that inspired

Dabo's work between 1937 and 1960, the exhibition focuses on the plein-air

paintings executed in France. Thirty-three examples of these Fauve landscapes

and marines are offered in the retrospective.

D. Wigmore Fine art, Inc is located at 22 East 76th Street. The gallery is

open Monday through Friday, 9:30 am to 5:30 pm. For further information, call

212/794-2128.