Lot 228 : Jack Tworkov (1900-1982)

Jack Tworkov - 1900-1982

Auction Location: United States of America - 2005
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Artist or Maker:

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982)

Title:

Watergame

Description:

Watergame
signed, titled and dated '"Watergame" Tworkov 55' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
69 x 59 in. (175.3 x 149.8 cm.)
Painted in 1955.

Provenance:

Stable Gallery, New York

Exhibited:

New York, Stable Gallery, Tworkov: Exhibition of Paintings, April-May 1957, n.p. (illustrated).
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Paintings by Jack Tworkov, December 1957.
Basel, Kunsthalle; Milan, Galeria Civca d'Arte Moderne; Madrid, Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo; Berlin, Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts; Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne and London, Tate Gallery, The New American Painting, (exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York), April 1958-March 1959.

Notes:

Property from the Collection of Lee V. Eastman

Watergame is a classic example of Jack Tworkov's strongest artistic sensibilities. Made with a dense accumulation of fiercely directional hash marks, Tworkov produces an optically charged surface operating not unlike the atmospheric haze most commonly associated with the late impressionist works of Claude Monet. However, what emerges from the shallow depths is not a recognized mimetic image but the ever changing gestalt of an abstracted reality.

In the mid to late 1950s Tworkov, like his friend and colleague Willem de Kooning, was actually "liquefying" cubism. Between the years 1954-1955 the two artists seem to be working in stride as both gave themselves over to a non-objective abstraction informed by their earlier obsessions with the figure, landscape and, uniquely with Tworkov, the traditional still life. While de Kooning was still working from the figure as a point of departure it seems that Tworkov had abandoned figuration all together for a process of accumulation that was graphically less organic in feel and perhaps more architectonic by design.

This was a time of great confidence and productivity in the life of this deliberate painter. Tworkov had finally loosened the shackles of fear and anxiety that had informed his earlier works that were formally steeped in the teachings of Cezanne, an early and persistent influence. Tworkov created an incredible body of work at this time before switching gears to a more minimal and geometric art in the mid 1960s. Although his later works are accomplished, it is during the period between 1955-1963 that Tworkov created some of his most celebrated paintings.