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[Click any image below for more details] The life of action painter Harold Shapinsky has all the qualities of a Verdi opera. Shapinsky took part in his first gallery show in 1950 where he received a positive mention in the New York Times. His career was promptly cut short by the draft board, and after his discharge from the army in 1952, he spent decades in prolonged seclusion living on the edge of harsh poverty in the anonymity of the Manhattan five storey walk-up apartment he shared with his wife and son. Shy, moody and often ill, the artist distanced himself from the New York art scene, working in isolation for no one but himself for over thirty years. The artist's work "reappeared" in 1984. There must have been a Rip Van Winkle feeling to those critics and dealers who trudged up the steps to the Shapinsky flat and sat at the kitchen table as the artist pulled picture after picture out from under his bed. It wasn't that this artist's work was underknown, it was unknown. Clearing away the cobwebs of time, what was apparent then, and remains true to this day, is the overall quality of the work and the artist's passion that led to its creation and which sustained it over the decades. Had Shapinsky participated in the art world for those three and a half decades, there is every possibility that his paintings would be discussed along with the work of Michael Goldberg, Norman Bluhm or Joan Mitchell, painters who were all born within three years of Shapinsky's 1925 birth. Abstract Expressionist paintings are often painted in a billboard scale. Harold Shapinsky really never had a studio. Most of the pictures he created in the fifties, sixties and seventies, which rarely exceed 24 x 30 inches, reflect the constraints of being created at the kitchen table in a small, cramped apartment. They are, nevertheless, characterized by an energy and intensity that transcends their intimate scale. Most of the pieces on view were among those pictures that were "stored" in his apartment near Seventieth Street on Second Avenue. Shapinsky's work has been the subject of nine solo-exhibitions since 1985. Lawrence Weschler's article highlighting the artist's discovery was the subject of a large article in the December 16, 1985 issue of The New Yorker. Paintings by Harold Shapinsky are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D .C.; the Tate Modern, London, the Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel. |
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Ivan Le Lorraine Albright Robert Salmon |
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