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William
Baziotes/Works and
biography
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Untitled
1943 |
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William Baziotes was born June 11, 1912, in Pittsburgh,
to parents of Greek origin. He grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania,
where he worked at the J. M. Kase & Company, a factory
specializing in stained glass, from 1931 to 1933, antiquing
glass and running errands. At this time, he took evening
sketch classes and met the poet Byron Vazakas, who became
his lifelong friend. Vazakas introduced Baziotes to
the work of Charles Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets.
In 1931, Baziotes saw the Henri Matisse exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1933 he
moved to that city to study painting. From 1933 to 1936,
Baziotes attended the National Academy of Design.
In 1936, he exhibited for the first time in a group
show at the Municipal Art Gallery, New York, and was
employed by the WPA Federal Art Project as an art teacher
at the Queens Museum. Baziotes worked in the easel division
of the WPA from 1938 to 1941. He met the Surrealist
émigrés in New York in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, and by 1940 knew Jimmy Ernst, Matta,
and Gordon Onslow-Ford. He began to experiment with
Surrealist automatism at this time. In 1941, Matta introduced
Baziotes to Robert Motherwell, with whom he formed a
close friendship. André Masson invited Baziotes
to participate with Motherwell, David Hare, and others
in the 1942 exhibition First Papers of Surrealism at
the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in New York. In 1943, he took
part in two group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s
Art of This Century, New York, where his first solo
exhibition was held the following year. With Hare, Motherwell,
and Mark Rothko, Baziotes founded The Subjects of the
Artist school in New York in 1948. Over the next decade,
Baziotes held a number of teaching positions in New
York: at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at New York
University from 1949 to 1952; at the People’s
Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, from 1950 to 1952;
and at Hunter College from 1952 to 1962. Baziotes died
in New York on June 6, 1963. A memorial exhibition of
his work was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York, in 1965, and at the Peggy Guggenheim
Collection, Venice, in 2004.
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