Bud Holman
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14.5 x 22.75 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Archespaper)
14.5 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14.5 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14.5 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Mixed media (oil and fabric on Arches paper)
14 x 22.5 inches (unframed dimensions)
1959–64
$5,000
Bio Synopsis
Shortly after arriving in New York in 1954, Bud Holman began to quietly but clearly made his mark on the New York art world. His best friend was Cy Twombly, through whom he became close to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — even though Holman didn’t fit neatly into a period when serial movements — from AbEx to Pop to Minimalism to Conceptualism — was de rigueur, with the newest style eclipsing the last. Here was an artist more concerned with the paintings of the reclusive Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose paintings imparted in him a love of mystery and poetic mood that would mark his own landscapes.
In 1956 Holman became the director the avant-garde Bertha Schaefer Gallery and mounted a solo exhibition for his friend Alfred Jensen. In 1959 David Rockefeller asked him to take on a new challenge: Be chief curator for the first major corporate art collection in America, where art would hang in every office at Rockefeller’s new 60-story headquarters on Wall Street for Chase Manhattan Bank. Holman spent the next three years visiting the studios of his artist friends and assembling the pioneering art collection. In 1974, after twenty years in New York, he slipped away to the Southwest where he could focus in peace and meditate on what the landscape — and art — really meant. He found that peace — and fervor — in the high desert, creating a style that is unique in the history of contemporary American landscape painting. That same energy can be felt in this exhibition featuring his early collage paintings of the dunes of Sagaponack.
About this Series
During the summers Holman escaped to his favorite refuge, a summer cottage in Sagaponack on Long Island’s East End. “I purchased big sheets of rag paper and then cut smaller pieces for the landscapes. These collages are inspired by the landscape of the Sagaponack dunes on Long Island. I sat on the floor of my New York studio and for five years returned to work on this series, from 1959 to 1964. These collages, like my canvases, really come from the spirit of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Thomas Moran’s exuberance for the landscape of the Old West.”
– Peter Hastings Falk
Read the full backstory about Holman here.