“William Baziotes: 32 Years Later”
at the Blum Helman Gallery, New York.
January 18–March 4, 1995

reviewed by Mario Naves

To mention the name William Baziotes (1912–1963) is to conjure up
images of indeterminate spaces populated by enigmatic forms. If it
can be said that a purposeful ambiguity informs Baziotes’s work,
“ambiguous” might also suffice as a description of the
artist’s reputation. While his paintings are usually associated with
those of the Abstract Expressionists, a group of artists with whom he
exhibited and fraternized, they don’t quite fit the label. His work
isn’t “action painting”: the patient scumbling of oils hardly
constitutes the stuff of gestural bravado. And while he took an
interest in the spiritual side of Abstract Expressionism (epitomized
by painters like Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still) Baziotes’s
affiliation with it is, at best, tenuous.

Most significant, Baziotes was never really an abstract artist.
His signature paintings deal with the figure, or, rather, the
figurative. The biomorphic gremlins populating Baziotes’s work
stubbornly refuse to become mere signs; they have character and their
animism is genuine. Consequently, Baziotes’s brand of homegrown
Surrealism remains too elusive for snug categorization, and his work
is little seen nowadays in New York museums—perhaps curators
consider him too much of an anomaly. Yet, one of the welcome ironies
of historical hindsight is that he may prove to be a better painter
than is currently acknowledged. But given the undeserved
distinction bestowed upon painters like Jackson Pollock and Barnett
Newman—artists who