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The Flesh Eaters

William BaziotesWW-1952-155997

1952·Oil and charcoal on canvas·60 × 72 1/8 in. (152.4 × 183.2 cm)

Purchase, George A. Hearn Fund, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, and Hearn Funds, Bequest of Charles F. Iklé, and Gifts of Mrs. Carroll J. Post and Mrs. George S. Amory, by exchange, 1995

Catalogue

Year: 1952
Medium: Oil and charcoal on canvas
Dimensions: 60 × 72 1/8 in. (152.4 × 183.2 cm)
Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artist: William Baziotes

Artist

William Baziotes

Painting

William Baziotes was an American abstract painter whose biomorphic forms emerged from automatic drawing and a sustained engagement with Surrealist psychology. Working primarily in oil on canvas from the 1940s until his death in 1963, he developed a vocabulary of floating, organic shapes that suggest marine life and primordial landscapes without representing them directly. His practice bridged the gestural abstraction of the New York School with a dreamlike, introspective sensibility rooted in chance and the unconscious. Baziotes' soft, translucent color fields and ambiguous figural elements established him as a distinctive voice in postwar American abstraction.

New York, NY, USA

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