Walter Darby Bannard1972 Abstract "Natural Christmas" Alkyd Resin Painting Walter Darby Bannard, 1972

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Walter Darby Bannard (born September 23, 1934 in New Haven, CT)
"Natural Christmas (1972)"
Alkyd Resin Magna Medium Aquatec Gel … Read more Walter Darby Bannard (born September 23, 1934 in New Haven, CT)
"Natural Christmas (1972)"
Alkyd Resin Magna Medium Aquatec Gel on Canvas Painting

Walter Darby Barnard is a Professor of Art at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. His work is included in many prestigious public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Guggenheim Museum; Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art; Baltimore Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
also known as Darby Bannard, is an American abstract expressionist painter.
Bannard was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he graduated in 1952. He attended Princeton University, where he befriended Frank Stella and Michael Fried, who were also interested in minimalist abstraction. This continued after graduation and eventuated in the extreme minimalism both artists engaged in around 1959 and thereafter. The first paintings from the 1959-1965 period contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-60s. In the late 60s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He was associated with Lyrical Abstraction, Minimalism, Formalism (art), Post-painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting.
He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms, which continues to the present.
Bannard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968.
Bannard’s first solo show was at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in January, 1965 and he had exhibitions there until 1970. He began showing at the Lawrence Rubin Gallery, and then in 1974 at the Knoedler Contemporary Gallery, where he showed for the next 15 years. Currently he shows at the Loretta Howard Gallery and the Berry Campbell Gallery in New York City, the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles and the Center for Visual Communication in Miami, Florida. He has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries nationally and internationally to the present day.
Bannard has had close to a hundred solo exhibitions, been in several hundred group shows including Six Painters (along with Dan Christensen, Ron Davis, Larry Poons, and Peter Young) “Masters of the Sixties,” Edmonton Art Gallery and Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada, Milton Avery, Walter Darby Bannard ; Jack Bush; Anthony Caro; Helen Frankenthaler; Hans Hofmann; Morris Louis; Robert Motherwell Kenneth Noland; Jules Olitski; Larry Poons; Michael Steiner; Frank Stella and is represented in the collections of all the major New York museums and many others around the world. He is a prolific writer on art with over a hundred published essays and reviews; Bannard has taught, lectured and participated in panel discussions, and has been a Co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts. He curated and wrote the catalog for the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Hans Hofmann, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.
Currently Bannard is Professor and Head of Painting of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami.
In 2016, noted art historian, Barbara Rose, curated a major exhibition for Roberto Polo Gallery in Brussels, Belgium entitled, “Post-Painterly Abstraction: Belgium-USA” featuring paintings by sixteen US and Belgian artists including Walter Darby Bannard, Ed Moses and Larry Poons.
Clement Greenberg included Bannard in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964 an exhibition of thirty-one artists associated with these art developments. He titled it Post-Painterly Abstraction. Leading figures were Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
Bannard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. He also served as co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts.
From 1989 to 1992, Bannard chaired the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he taught painting until his death in 2016.
Bannard was associated with modernism, lyrical abstraction, minimalism, formalism, abstraction and color field painting. His art has been exhibited in nearly a hundred solo exhibitions and several hundred group exhibitions.
Bannard's paintings from 1959 to 1965 contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-1960s. The critic Phyllis Tuchman wrote about a 2015 exhibition of these works at Berry Campbell Gallery, "These colors are still radiant. And the artist’s pale palette is as uniquely personal today as it was fifty years ago. You can’t even apply a name to his hues."
In the late 1960s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms.
Bannard wrote over a hundred reviews and essays which appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and many other publications. He curated and wrote the catalog for the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Hans Hofmann at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, a collection of his thoughts edited by Franklin Einspruch, was published in 2022.

Selected museum collections

Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Modern Art, MoMA NYC
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Portland Art Museum
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio
Baltimore Museum, Maryland
Blanton Museum of Art
The University at Texas, Austin
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Cleveland Museum, Ohio
Dallas Museum of Fine Art, Texas
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Honolulu Museum, Hawaii
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Larry Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York See less