Word: natkin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...very old-fashioned," admits Los Angeles' Richard Diebenkorn. "Though I'm interested in most of the new art, painting remains for me a very physical thing, an involvement with a tangible feeling of sensation." In that, Manhattan's Robert Natkin would concur. "The giant cool that is part of today's life-style repulses me," he says. "The artist has to have vulnerability, open up his feelings, and find a loving commitment." Though Diebenkorn and Natkin belong to no school and live and work on opposite sides of the continent, their similar approaches to painting have...
Gingham Checks. Robert Natkin likes to refer to his beginnings as "early nothing." His father was a rag dealer, and so bleak was the Chicago neighborhood in which he was born 38 years ago, he recalls, that it left him with a lasting sense of esthetic deprivation-a fact that probably accounts for the almost pretty profusion of colors in his present canvases. After studying at Chicago's Art Institute, where he was most influenced by the Postimpressionist collection, he found no galleries in which to display his work...
...Natkin responded by opening the Wells Street Gallery in 1957 in which he exhibited his own paintings along with other Abstract Expressionists. With the gallery's demise after a couple of years, Natkin set off with his wife Judith Dolnick, also a painter, for New York. There he achieved modest success in a succession of one-man shows. In September, the San Francisco Museum of Art will give him the accolade of a full-scale retrospective...
...Natkin admits shamelessly that he wants his painting to portray, with sad beauty, time and a sense of the natural world. Each series has its own literary overtones. His Faust series looks "on the dark side of life," but reflects Faust's gallant laughter in the face of evil. For his "Field Mouse" series (which contains no visible field mouse), he quotes from Ezra Pound...
Though his abstractions-unlike Diebenkorn's-seem to belong more to the realm of fantasy than fact, Natkin manages nonetheless to stimulate the imagination and guide the eye to a place of persuasive charm that is both abstract and real...