From the collection of Dr. Aurelio de la Vega, the world renowned Cuban composer, conductor, and music professor, who taught at Cal State Northridge (CSUN) for over three decades, during which time he was Distinguished Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music Studio.
This gorgeous pastel was acquired around the early 1980's, by the present owner. It is unframed, and in very good condition. It is signed, dedicated and dated 1982. It is 24 x 18".
Hans Burkhardt (1904 – 1994) was a Swiss-American artist who immigrated to New York in 1924. He studied at Cooper Union and then at Grand Central School, where he met Arshile Gorky, a pivotal artist in the transition from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism. Burkhardt quickly became Gorky’s colleague and trusted friend. They even collaborated on several works. From 1928 to 1937, Burkhardt shared Gorky’s studio. Willem de Kooning, another Gorky disciple, was a frequent guest.
Moving to Los Angeles in late 1937, Burkhardt served as a link between East and West Coast progressive art. Anticipating the work of his contemporaries in New York and Europe, he began to forge his signature style. From the 1930s through his final work in 1993, Burkhardt’s art presents a poignant testament to the human experience. His output includes monumental anti-war work (“the fiercer ones”) as well as lyrical expressions of hope (“the happy ones”). His anti-war work responded to the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and conflicts in Central America and Iraq. It is for good reason that Eugene Anderson wrote that Burkhardt was “Goya’s spiritual heir.” Explaining his choice of subjects, Burkhardt simply stated, “I paint the way I live.”
In the 1940s Burkhardt met and exhibited with a group of transplanted Surrealists in Los Angeles, including Man Ray, Knud Merrild, and Eugene Berman. Describing his work of this time, he wrote, “(my) paintings evolve out of emotions and ideas” — a process not unlike the Surrealist’s conception of the genesis of creative thought.
In 1950, while Painterly and Color Field Abstract Expressionism held sway in New York, Burkhardt worked in isolation in Los Angeles and Mexico, painting rich abstract work of extraordinary emotional range.
During the 60s, as the Los Angeles art world was seduced by California Light and Space, Hard Edge, Minimalism, and Pop Art, Burkhardt continued to paint independent works of great emotional power. His masterpiece, My Lai, includes human skulls embedded into a dark scorched earth surface reminiscent of Baroque altarpieces. This work predates work by such artists as Anselm Kiefer by twenty years. Suggesting a legacy for the artist, Donald Kuspit wrote that “Burkhardt is a master — indeed the inventor — of the abstract memento mori.”
During the 70s, Burkhardt created a series of paintings entitled “Graffiti,” in which he responded to socio-political upheaval in his Swiss homeland. These Neo-Expressionist works anticipated the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Hans Burkhardt is known for his meticulously structured and balanced paintings that blur the distinction between abstraction and representation. Burkhardt continually returned to depictions of war through abstract paintings dated from as early as World War II and as recently as the Gulf War in the early 1990s. A talented draughtsman and former student of Arshile Gorky, Burkhardt thought painting must have careful drawing as its basis. He always sketched in pencil, pastels, or ink before building up his heavily layered, fleshy surfaces in oil.
In 1992, Burkhardt was honored in New York by the American Academy of Art for his lifetime achievement. He died in Los Angeles in 1994.
Just some of his solo shows and museums with this American Master's work in their permanent collections:
1939 Stendahl Gallery, Los Angeles
1945 Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Hans Burkhardt”
1951 Museo de Bellas Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico: "Exhibicion de Pinturas Modernas"
1953 Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
1957 Pasadena Art Museum, California: "Ten Year Retrospective"
1962 Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco: "Thirty Year Retrospective"
1964 Palm Springs Art Museum
1968 San Diego Museum of Art: "Vietnam Paintings"
1972 Long Beach Museum of Art, California: "Retrospective 1950 – 1972"
1973 California State University, Northridge: "A Retrospective Exhibition"
1977 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California: "Linocuts and Pastels"
1978 Laguna Beach Museum of Art, California: "Mark Tobey / Hans Burkhardt"
1982 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles: "Arshile Gorky and Hans Burkhardt"
1983 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles: "Hans Burkhardt: Basel Graffiti Series"
1984 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles: "Pastels: 50 Years of Figurative Expressionism"
1985 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles: "Hans Burkhardt: The War Paintings"
1990 Portland Art Museum, Oregon: "Mark Tobey and Hans Burkhardt"
1991 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, Los Angeles: "Hans Burkhardt: Desert Storms"
1992 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York: "Hans Burkhardt"
2008 California State University Northridge: "Hans Burkhardt"
2017 Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in conjunction with the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA: "Hans Burkhardt in Mexico"
Hans Burkhardt’s works have in recent years increasingly been exhibited in museum exhibitions nationally and internationally. He continues to attract significant critical attention from some of the leading art historians such as Peter Selz and Donald Kuspit. Burkhardt’s works are included in the collections of such major museums as:
The British Museum, London
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum, New York
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Portland Art Museum, Portland
Harvard Art Museum, Boston
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Lowe Art Museum, Miami, Florida, F
ine Arts Museum of San Francisco
Palace of the Legion Honor, San Francisco
Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN)
USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles
The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).