The Heckscher Museum of Art’s collection spans 500 years with particular emphasis on art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American landscape painting and work by Long Island artists, past and present, are particular strengths, as is American and European modernism.
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Chair with Wrought Iron Lamp
Ilya Bolotowsky was a Russian-born artist who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1923. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1924 to 1930, and in the late 1930s executed numerous murals for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Arts Project. While his early work was representational, Bolotowsky experimented with various contemporary modernist trends, becoming a founding member of the New York-based American Abstract Artists group in 1936. Profoundly influenced by Piet Mondrian's quest for universal balance and aesthetic harmony, Bolotowsky is most well-known for his work that explores the geometric abstraction of Neoplasticism's grid-based compositions, although he did not limit himself to the primary colors utilized by Mondrian.
In this early abstract still life, Bolotowsky completely flattens his forms, reducing the chair and lamp to simplified shapes and removing any sense of dimensionality. His overlapping, angular blocks of color fracture the image, recalling the styles of early European modernists, such as Picasso and Matisse, which the artist had studied while abroad.