City, Country, City: Paintings by Gandy Brodie

exhibition dates: February 25 - March 22, 2014

reception: Thursday, February 27, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to host an exhibition of paintings by the second-generation New York School painter Gandy Brodie (1925-1975). Brodie’s work combines stark almost primitive imagery with dense heavily worked surfaces. The exhibition will feature important paintings from a body of work spanning over two decades. Brodie was essentially self-taught. After studying dance with Martha Graham, he began painting in the mid forties inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night along with works by Picasso and Paul Klee that he saw at the Museum of Modern Art. While he had no formal training Brodie was encouraged by Hans Hofmann who bought an early painting of a jazz trumpeter from him and invited him to attend his weekly criticisms of student work. Brodie was inspired by jazz and had a friendship with Billie Holiday. The Hirshhorn Museum owns a large painting by Brodie of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. In 1951 Meyer Schapiro selected him for a two-person New Talent show at the Kootz Gallery along with Cy Twombly who had been selected by Clement Greenberg. Schapiro praised Brodie as “one of the best painters of his generation.” Brodie was included in the 1957 Artists of the New York School: Second Generation show at the Jewish Museum as well as being included in Thomas Hess’s 1956 article U.S. Painting: Some Recent Directions. His work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. In 2006 Brodie’s Meditation on a Kosher Tag, 1963, was included in the Soutine and Modern Art exhibition at the Cheim and Read Gallery along with works by Pollock, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Resnick and others. The exhibition has been selected by curator Craig Manister to exhibit the range of Brodie’s work in subject matter, color, scale and surface. All works are on loan from the estate of Gandy Brodie, courtesy of steven harvey fine art projects and other private collections.