The Sabbath of History
William Congdon
Coming February 22–September 16, 2012
William Congdon (1912-1998) is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential painters of his generation. He was an American Action painter whose expressive images of urban landscapes and religious themes caught the attention of critics and fellow artists alike who praised the intensity of his vision and his unique form of abstraction. For Congdon, painting was a form of theology and an activity through which a particular kind of devotion could be enacted.
Working in a cold-water studio on the Bowery, Congdon used spatulas to load his panels with richly colored impasto, into which he incised delicate lines that coalesce to form portraits of urban desolation, indefinite rural landscapes, or the crucified body of Christ. A direct encounter with Congdon’s paintings reveals that they are evidence of a profound spiritual journey, a struggle whose tensions somehow persist in the complicated and beautiful pictures he made. His first show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1949, sold out. In 1951, he was profiled in Life magazine. Although Congdon’s work is represented in many U.S. collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, his work is rarely exhibited in the United States.
Next spring, on the centennial of Congdon’s birth, the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, Connecticut will highlight Congdon’s artistic legacy by featuring fifty of his most renowned paintings from private collections and museums in Italy, Great Britain and the United States together with five meditations on Holy Week by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The juxtaposition of Congdon’s pictures and Ratzinger’s text creates a unique context that uses Ratzinger’s thoughts on the Sabbath as a framework with which to better understand the tensions that compelled Congdon’s artistic life.
The Sabbath of History will provide a comprehensive view of Congdon’s oeuvre and offer the American public a unique opportunity to rediscover the extraordinary works that the artist created over the course of his prolific career.
William Congdon was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and received a bachelor's degree at Yale University in 1934. In 1942, Congdon volunteered for ambulance duty with the American Field Service and in 1945 he was one of the first Americans to participate in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the end of the war, Congdon moved to New York, where he exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery and met the major protagonists of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In the 1950s he left New York to live in Europe and in 1959 he converted to Catholicism. He continued to exhibit with Parsons until 1967, had one-person shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and was included in numerous museum surveys of contemporary American art. In 1964, he attended the Eucharistic Congress in Bombay, India, traveling from Rome with Pope Paul VI.
In 1979, after his relocation to the outskirts of Milan, Congdon’s pictorial language underwent a profound transformation. In the lowlands of Lombardy his paintings became increasingly abstract in their depictions of the surrounding landscape, at times coming close to monochrome painting. Congdon died on his 86th birthday, Wednesday, April 15, 1998 in a hospital in Milan, Italy.
Organized by the Knights of Columbus Museum and the William G. Congdon Foundation, Milan, The Sabbath of History will open during February 2012 in New Haven. The exhibition is co-curated by Rodolfo Balzarotti, the Foundation’s research director, and independent curator and writer Daniel Mason.
The William G. Congdon Foundation was established in 1980 as a nonprofit institution whose mission is to manage the artistic legacy of the late American painter, William G. Congdon. The Foundation maintains a sizeable collection of the artist’s visual and literary works, which are made available for exhibitions worldwide.
The Foundation aims to further knowledge of the creative process in the context of contemporary art and to contribute to the investigation of art’s ethical and religious aspects. Thus, the overall concern of the Foundation is to encourage an in-depth knowledge and understanding of cultural and artistic production, especially during the last century. The main channels by which the Foundation seeks to achieve these aims are a systematic publishing program, the planning and creation of exhibitions on specific themes, and the organization of meetings, conferences, study seminars and round tables. Alongside these activities, the Foundation collects catalogues and published materials directly concerning contemporary artistic practice and its reflections in a wider cultural context.
RODOLFO BALZAROTTI
is an art critic and the research director of the William G. Congdon Foundation, in Milan. He is the author of numerous books and essays, including the monograph William Congdon (with Peter Selz and Fred Licht, Milan, 1992), and Il cantiere dell’artista (The Artist’s Workshop, Milan, 1984). He has contributed to various newspapers and magazines, including the Italian edition of “Communio.” Mr. Balzarotti has been the curator for several exhibitions and catalogues, including Analogia dell’icona, un cammino nell’espressionismo astratto (Museo Diocesano, Milan, 2005). He teaches a course on aesthetics at the Rotondi College near Varese.
DANIEL MASON
is an independent curator and writer based in New York. Upcoming exhibitions include History Contested, an exhibition of books on the history of photography in the Middle East and Persia at the International Center of Photography Library in New York, and Arthur Ganson: Kinetic Mandala, an exhibition of machine art at the Ramapo College Art Gallery in New Jersey. Recent exhibitions include Broom: The Full Sweep at the Stevenson Library, Bard College; Open Score Variations at the Center for Curatorial Studies; Art Beyond Sight, co-sponsored by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Education for the Blind, at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center; and What is a Line? Drawings from the Collection (Curatorial Team) at the Yale University Art Gallery. He holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. in History of Art from Yale University.