Charlotte Park

"Charlotte Park: Gathering," a focused exhibition of paintings by the Abstract Expressionist artist, is at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 22. 

New York gallery Berry Campbell had a standout booth, a curated presentation of 12 postwar women artists. The gallery has a distinct focus on re-examining underrepresented women artists of the 20th-century. Gallery owner Christine Berry called it “an incredible day,” noting high demand for artists including Alice Baber, Bernice Bing, and Lynne Drexler.

Works by Drexler sold for $885,000 and $200,000; the artist, who has been drawing intense interest, will likely be the subject of a traveling institutional retrospective at some point in the near future. A work by Baber went for $200,000—Berry Campbell hopes to mount a solo show of the artist next year.

Later on in the day, the gallery let Artnet News know that a painting by Ethel Schwabacher had been sold for $195,000.  

Proving that no force is stronger than girl power, Frampton Co and Berry Campbell present Women Choose Women at Exhibition The Barn.

Following our unorthodox cover last week, the January 13, 2023 cover of Dan’s Papers features a piece by late East End painter James Brooks (1906–1992).

The Missouri-born, Texas-raised and New York-settled painter is best remembered for his 1940 mural in the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, for his status as one of the Irascible 18 abstract expressionists who protested a 1950 modern art show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for his home/studio in Springs, once shared with his artist wife Charlotte Park, that’s now considered one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.

The art on this week’s cover, a 1982 painting titled “Eastern,” was provided to us by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, long ahead of the painting’s inclusion in the upcoming exhibition James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing, scheduled to debut at the museum on August 6.

Guest curated by Dr. Klaus Ottmann, the exhibition will be a “comprehensive survey of significant scope comprised of some 50 paintings drawn from public and private U.S. collections,” according to the museum’s website.

The show offers an overdue retrospective of the artist’s fascinating four-decade career and diverse range of art styles, as well as an insightful 125-page catalogue featuring a chronology, bibliography and interpretive essays by Ottmann and other experts.

We spoke to Ottmann about the cover art, Brooks’ career and the August exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum.

Berry Campbell: Community
August 11 - 14, 2022
Berry Campbell at Ashawagh hall
780 Springs Fireplace Road
 East Hampton, New York 11937

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Chelsea to Springs

Chelsea’s Berry Campbell Gallery takes over Ashawagh Hall in Springs from today through Sunday with a large group exhibition of artists, past and present, with strong East End connections.

The show includes works by Mary Abbott, Alice Baber, Nanette Carter, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Raymond Hendler, John Opper, Charlotte Park, Betty Parsons, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Hedda Sterne, Susan Vecsey, Lucia Wilcox, Frank Wimberley, and Larry Zox.

Gallery hours are today through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and noon to 6 on Sunday.

When you ask art historians and gallerists where the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement lived, they'll mention New York City a bit, but also point you a bit further east. The quaint East Hampton enclave of Springs is often regarded as a creativity incubator for artists, but one integral spot to the Abstract movement has been long overlooked: the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center.

Art couple James Brooks and Charlotte Park settled onto the idyllic, 11-acre parcel in 1954, deeming it as an artistic escape for all, and built a series of studios for creatives to work their magic. In a matter of months, it became the meeting spot for renowned artists such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center as one of America's Most Endangered Places in 2022.

For nearly a decade, local activists and art enthusiasts have been fighting to save Brooks' and Park's original home and studios from demolition while raising enough funds to preserve the location as a community landmark. Marietta Gavaris, an activist and painter who currently resides in Springs, believes the restoration of the arts and nature center would both help solidify Springs's mark on the art world and give the residents a place to feel inspired.

"It's one thing to see art hanging in a museum, but when you can explore where it was actually created and how artists interacted with nature, it's an indescribable experience," says Gavaris. "With its 11 acres and the adjoining hiking trails, we want art and nature enthusiasts alike to come to the site and enjoy not only the historic artist impact but just its environment."

Christine Berry, one of the founders of the Berry Campbell Gallery, adds that the site is also crucial in helping to tell the stories of female Expressionists, including that of Charlotte Park. A student of Yale's School of Fine Art and member of the prestigious New York School, Park was instrumental in shaping abstract art as we know it today with her ability to translate lush landscapes into forceful, painterly works. However, as with many other women of the time, her contributions were overshadowed by her male counterparts.

"On paper, Charlotte [Park] had almost the same exact resume as her husband, James [Brooks], and yet, so few people knew about her work," says Berry. "It's only as of late that her name is becoming part of the canon of art history. Her work was not representational in any way, but rather conceptual interpretations of every single day from her beautiful property in the spring."

Her studio at the Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center stands as an exhibition of her artistic process and solidifies the importance women have in the art world. Though as the years go on, Park's studio—along with the other structures on the campus—deteriorates more and more. Echoes of the site's demolition began in 2013 after the city of East Hampton purchased the land. However, the residents of Springs lobbied together to designate it a town historic landmark in 2014. Since then, Gavaris along with Preservation Long Island and other activists have been actively working with the members of the East Hampton town board to devise a plan that preserves the property and helps it reach its full potential.

Gavaris notes that the major roadblock currently in the town's way of preserving the site is the funding and support. The Brooks-Park Arts and Nature Center asks advocates to sign a petition on their site in support of the restoration of the home and studios of artists James Brooks and Charlotte Park.

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James Brooks and his wife, Charlotte Park, once walked to work each day — from the back of their shingled cottage, the screen door of the porch closing behind them, along a 100-yard-long path edged in moss that connected their tiny home in the woods of Springs with a pair of studios where they both painted.

The floor of the 11 acres of scrub oak forest that surrounded them was flecked with bits of grass, dry leaves and more moss, a thick canopy of green overhead in the summer. By winter, the naked limbs of the trees cast abstract shadows on the ground that looked as if they could have leapt off the canvas of one of their paintings.

In the spring and fall, as the seasons changed, Park would have taken note of the evolution of plants and flowers in the landscape, and commented on the birds passing through, nesting or migrating. She made careful and thorough observations of the natural world around her, noted in dozens of journals she kept over the decades she lived in Springs — from walks in the woods, outside her studio, or watching out the windows from the house that had once been a fisherman’s shack, all of it subtly informing her soft and warm canvases.

Meanwhile, on the floor of his self-designed studio — with its jagged roof line and flood of natural light — Brooks worked on his monumental paintings, conjuring lines and forms and pools of color.

Together, he and Park created some of the art that helped define the nascent abstract expressionist movement in America and established Springs as an outpost of creative thought in the wilds of the East End.

But today, those buildings — the house, two studios and another outbuilding used as guest quarters — are boarded up, some with tarps on their roofs to keep out the rain and snow. Parts are in danger of collapsing in on themselves. When the Town of East Hampton acquired the 11 acres as open space back in 2013, the intention was to simply knock down the buildings that stood there. Continue Reading

Charlotte Park in Chelsea
"Charlotte Park: Works on Paper From the 1950s" opens Thursday at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea and will continue through April 23. 

For Park, working on paper gave her considerable freedom. Her monochrome palette of the early '50s enabled her to focus on form. She reintroduced color into her art in the middle of the decade, evolving a lyrical style in which suggestions of the natural world appear. 

Park united painting and drawing throughout the decade, creating a vocabulary featuring clustered loops, black curvilinear forms, and anatomical suggestions, but figurative elements were either suppressed or diffused.

In the late '50s, Park and her husband, the painter James Brooks, relocated from Montauk to an 11-acre parcel in Springs that the Town of East Hampton acquired in 2013. A committee of community members is working to have the structures renovated and the site preserved as an art and nature center.

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Berry Campbell at Intersect Aspen:
Women of Abstract Expressionism
Booth A15

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Artist's Choice: Interconnected
May 7 - June 7, 2020
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Berry Campbell is pleased to announce Artist’s Choice: Interconnected, an exclusive online exhibition of works from gallery’s inventory chosen by Berry Campbell’s represented contemporary artists. Eric Dever, Judith Godwin, Ken Greenleaf, Jill Nathanson, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, and Frank Wimberley have thoughtfully selected one work from our gallery inventory that they associate with their own creative process and artistic journey. This artist-curated exhibition is an inquiry into the lines of influence and connections within our Berry Campbell artist community. Artist’s Choice: Interconnected launches digitally May 7, 2020.

The choices are sometimes expected, and at other times, surprising.  Some artists were inspired by a painting from an artist they had never met, and others paid tribute to old friends or mentors.  Judith Godwin recalls good times with her old friend and art dealer, Betty Parsons.  James Walsh remembers a painting by Walter Darby Bannard from a 1981 show at Knoedler Gallery.  Mike Solomon pays homage to the perseverance of abstract painter and dear friend, Frank Wimberley saying: “The quiet intermingling of his experience, with the purity of painting, gives his abstractions an authenticity and delicacy that is profound to witness.”  Ken Greenleaf favorite is Cloistered #5 (1968) by Ida Kohlmeyer, delighting in the pure abstraction.  Jill Nathanson picked a color-field forerunner, Dan Christensen.  Ann Purcell admitted to being picky but found true inspiration after visiting our Yvonne Thomas show repeatedly.  Eric Dever ruminates about Charlotte Park: “Like a favorite poem, novel or even film, a painting can be a touchstone, something one returns to with certain regularity; perhaps a gauge of some kind, beginning with personal happiness on the occasion of discovery and new revelation as our lives unfold.”  Joyce Weinstein finds parallels with John Opper.  Susan Vecsey loves the “stillness and movement” of Elaine de Kooning’s Six Horses, Blue Wall (1987).  No coincidence that Vecsey lives down the road from the Elaine de Kooning house in the Hamptons. Frank Wimberley recalls of Herman Cherry: “He was one of the East End artists who wished to me to succeed.”

ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL
Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have many parallels in their backgrounds and interests. Both studied art history in college, began their careers in the museum world, and later worked together at a major gallery in midtown Manhattan. Most importantly, however, Berry and Campbell share a curatorial vision.

Both art dealers developed a strong emphasis on research and networking with artists and scholars during their art world years. They decided to work together, opening Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013 in the heart of New York's Chelsea art district, at 530 West 24th Street on the ground floor. In 2015, the gallery expanded, doubling its size with an additional 2,000 square feet of exhibition space.

Highlighting a selection of postwar and contemporary artists, the gallery fulfills an important gap in the art world, revealing a depth within American modernism that is just beginning to be understood, encompassing the many artists who were left behind due to race, gender, or geography-beyond such legendary figures as Pollock and de Kooning. Since its inception, the gallery has been especially instrumental in giving women artists long overdue consideration, an effort that museums have only just begun to take up, such as in the 2016 traveling exhibition, Women of Abstract Expressionism, curated by University of Denver professor Gwen F. Chanzit. This show featured work by Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, both represented by Berry Campbell, along with that of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. In 2019, Berry Campbell's exhibition, Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (Paintings 1963 - 1965) was reviewed by Roberta Smith for the New York Times, in which Smith wrote that Thomas, "... kept her hand in, adding a fresh directness of touch, and the results give her a place in the still-emerging saga of postwar American abstraction.”

In addition to Perle Fine and Judith Godwin, artists whose work is represented by the gallery include Edward Avedisian, Walter Darby Bannard, Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Eric Dever, John Goodyear, Ken Greenleaf, Raymond Hendler, Ida Kohlmeyer, Jill Nathanson, John Opper, Stephen Pace, Charlotte Park, William Perehudoff, Ann Purcell, Mike Solomon, Syd Solomon, Albert Stadler, Yvonne Thomas, Susan Vecsey, James Walsh, Joyce Weinstein, Frank Wimberley, Larry Zox, and Edward Zutrau. The gallery has helped promote many of these artists' careers in museum shows including that of Bannard at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2018-19); Syd Solomon, in a traveling museum show which culminates at the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota and has been extended through 2021; Stephen Pace at The McCutchan Art Center/Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana (2018) and at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2019); and Vecsey and Mike Solomon at the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina (2017 and 2019, respectively); and Eric Dever at the Suffolk Community College, Riverhead, New York (2020). In an April 3, 2020 New York Times review of Berry Campbell's exhibition of Ida Kohlmeyer's Cloistered paintings, Roberta Smith stated: “These paintings stunningly sum up a moment when Minimalism was giving way to or being complicated by something more emotionally challenging and implicitly feminine and feminist. They could hang in any museum.”

Collaboration is an important aspect of the gallery. With the widened inquiries and understandings that have resulted from their ongoing discussions about the art world canon, the dealers feel a continual sense of excitement in the discoveries of artists and research still to be made.

Berry Campbell is located in the heart of the Chelsea Arts District at 530 West 24th Street, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10011.  For further information, contact us at 212.924.2178, info@berrycampbell.com or www.berrycampbell.com.

Berry Campbell Celebrates Women's History Month

Ida Kohlmeyer
VIDEO: Virtual Exhibition Walkthrough

Women of Abstract Expressionism 
Inventory Highlights
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Ann Purcell
Upcoming Exhibition: Kali Poems
View Works by Ann Purcell

Judith Godwin
Forbes Magazine: Add to Your list of '5 Women Artists' at These Museums Around The United States
by Chadd Scott

Charlotte Park
Client Testimonial: 
"Extremely gratifying to see Paul Kasmin Gallery's eye-opening summer show, Painters of the East End reviewed by Erin Kimmel in this month's Art in America . And smiled extra wide that AbEx talent Charlotte Park is written up in the same paragraph as — and holds her own with— Joan Mitchell. 'Park's virtuosic oil and crayon compositions (ca. 1965 and 1967) feature dendrite-like configurations in a palette of bright pinks, yellows and blues that appear frozen mid twist.' Ten years ago Christine Berry, owner of one of the most engaging and provocative galleries in Chelsea, Berry Campbell, thankfully introduced me to the work of Charlotte Park, who died in 2010 at age 92 in Montauk, where she lived and painted. She was the wife of artist James Brooks, supporting his career at the expense of her own, and dear friends and neighbors of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner." 
-Adam Beckerman
View Works by Charlotte Park 

Yvonne Thomas
Eazel Interactive Exhibition | Yvonne Thomas: Windows and Variations (1963-1965) 

Susan Vecsey
blue. 
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York
View Works by Susan Vecsey

Jill Nathanson
LINEA: Studio Notes from the Art Students League of New York
Artist Snapshot: Jill Nathanson 

Perle Fine
What We See, How We See
Through April 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
View Works by Perle Fine

Joyce Weinstein
Postwar Women
Curated by William Corwin
The Art Students League, New York
View Works by Joyce Weinstein

What do Elaine de Kooning, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Bourgeois, and Faith Ringgold have in common? They all studied at the Art Students League of New York—and they are all featured in a new show at the school highlighting the accomplishments of its many women students.

Titled “Postwar Women,” the exhibition, curated by Will Corwin, features more than 40 women who studied at the school between 1945 and 1965. “It seemed like the obvious choice because before the war, most of the women students here were wealthy or had family who supported them as artists,” Corwin told Artnet News at the exhibition’s opening. “During this period, you actually get working-class women becoming artists. And of course, you get the Abstract Expressionists.”

Corwin has put together an impressive selection of works by well-known alumna—Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Louise Nevelson are also among the big names—alongside examples by an intriguing array of artists who haven’t yet been widely recognized for their talents.

“The league’s list of famous graduates is like everybody you’ve ever heard of,” Corwin said. For him, the curatorial challenge was balancing expectations: ensuring that all the major names were in place while still creating opportunities for viewers to discover new artists.

The essay for Joan Marter’s exhibition at Guild Hall, “Abstract Expressionism Revisited: Selections From the Guild Hall Permanent Collection,” is notable for reminding us about the people behind the pictures and sculptures. For her, the artists’ relationship to this environment and other factors affecting the work that ended up here are essential to understanding its relevance.

This makes sense in the context of the museum’s permanent collection, which exists only because so many of these artists lived and worked here and left some of their legacy behind as they rocketed to international recognition and acclaim.

Guild Hall, which has recently fully archived and digitized its collection, is celebrating just some of what it has with this exhibition. The show’s unfussy title takes us back to a simpler time, before stratospheric auction results in the tens and hundreds of millions, to when these artists might have been famous and well to do on a more modest scale, if at all.

November 2 − December 1
Art Students League: The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery

Postwar Women is The Art Students League’s first exhibition to explore the vital contributions of these alumnae on the international stage. On view at The Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery from November 2 to December 1, 2019, Postwar Women challenges the misperception that great art produced by women artists is somehow an exception rather than the rule. Curator Will Corwin investigates the history of innovative art academies like The League that promoted democratic ideologies, which in turn created artistic opportunities for women of all social classes. This ground-breaking exhibition features over forty artists active between 1945-65, tracing the complex networks these professional women formed to support one another and their newfound access to art education. Postwar Women presents work by some of the prominent artists of the 20th Century like Louise Bourgeois and Helen Frankenthaler, but more importantly it calls out the women who were not credited enough: Mavis Pusey, Kazuko Miyamoto, Olga Albizu and Helena Vieira da Silva – challenging a new generation of visitors and art students to KNOW YOUR FOREMOTHERS.

Featured Artists:
Berenice Abbott, Mary Abbott, Olga Albizu, Janice Biala, Isabel Bishop, Nell Blaine, Regina Bogat, Louise Bourgeois, Vivian Browne, Elizabeth Catlett, Dorothy Dehner, Elaine de Kooning, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Judith Godwin, Terry Haass, Grace Hartigan, Carmen Herrera, Eva Hesse, Faith Hubley, Lenore Jaffee, Gwendolyn Knight, Lee Krasner, Blanche Lazzell, Marguerite Louppe, Lenita Manry, Marisol, Mercedes Matter, Kazuko Miyamoto, Louise Nevelson, Charlotte Park, Joyce Pensato, Irene Rice Pereira, Mavis Pusey, Faith Ringgold, Edith Schloss, May Stevens,  Yvonne Thomas, Lynn Umlauf, Maria Vieira da Silva, Merrill Wagner, Joyce Weinstein, Michael West

Art and Antiques

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View Works by Charlotte Park

As the Royal Academy in London two years ago, the “New York School” prepared a great appearance, were intended for the painter’s inner self-supporting roles only very sparingly. After all, the Denver Art Museum in Texas, had 2016, also, the artists of the Abstract expressionism devoted to an Overview of the Setareh now has the düsseldorf gallery, are excited to a Review: The thirteen artists in the exhibition – the majority in New York, but also in Europe – quite an expressive abstraction of the day, but found only in a few cases, inclusion in the exclusive circles and Clubs of men. The painters were in turn represented in a large number of, of all things, of the two avant-garde gallery owners, namely the Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons.

The name of the in Dusseldorf, gathered painters, Helen frankenthaler and Lee Krasner, anything other than common. And all of you would like to see more than two to three images from the fifties and sixties. Especially from the in 1923 in Kapuvár, born a Hungarian, Judit Reigl and the energetic Gera Celts images from the series “Ecriture en mass”: instead of appearing to be a cross-format Reigl distributed with the spatula bizarre Islands of cabbage Raven black oil Paint on snow white and leaves behind the traces of the Malakts on the canvas – powerful, these contrasts. The Surrealist André Breton was fond of Reigls way to paint and organized in the fifties, the first exhibitions for the artist, who now lives in France...

With so much going on during Armory Week in Manhattan, you can be forgiven for not getting to the Charlotte Park survey on view at the Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea, but it's really your loss.

Redemption can be jubilant, as the current resonant solo show devoted to Charlotte Park (1918-2010) at Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea proves. After decades in the shadow of her husband, James Brooks, Park steps forward from the Abstract Expressionist chorus and unleashes her singular strong voice, hitting all the top notes of color, gesture and scale with confident power. 

In the Hamptons of the 1950s and ’60s, there were two significant pairs of artists working in Abstract Expressionism. The two couples were also friends. One set you know: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The other you might not: James Brooks (1906–1992) and Charlotte Park (1918–2010).

Brooks and Park were both artists when they met in Washington, D.C., during World War II. They moved to New York together in 1945 and forged a fast friendship with Pollock and Krasner, renting studio space from them in the city and eventually following their lead to resettle on Long Island. “These artists were forging a new aesthetic,” Helen Harrison of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has said, “and only they understood what they were doing, so there was this sense of camaraderie.”