Museum Quality William Congdon American Artist watercolor Ex. Betty Parsons Gallery, circa 1950, 7 x 8" image 14 1/4 x 14 1/4" mat, entitled "Ischia #8"Congdon verso, Margaret Brown Gallery and Betty Parsons Labels on back of mat board
Congdon went to live in New York in February 1948, renting a room on Stanton Street in the Bowery. From this point up, cities would become a leitmotif of his painting; the city was seen as the setting of history, as the site of social tensions and dramas. The first depictions of New York - crumbling façades of cheap buildings, jittery, nervously-penned windows that offer no dominant perspective over a heaving urban magma - seem to reflect the same moral criticism that can be seen in his war drawings.
Thanks to the eruption onto the scene of a whole new generation of “American” artists – Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart – the city now had an artistic culture that was as stimulating as that of Paris in the 1920s. Through his frame-maker, Leo Robinson, Congdon met Betty Parsons, whose gallery - after Peggy Guggenheim’s “The Art of This Century gallery” closed down - had become one of the prime venues for the promotion of the New York School. Congdon began his almost-twenty-year association with the gallery with his first one-man show in May 1949, on the occasion of which he met most of the leading artists of the day, forming particularly close links with Richard Pousette-Dart and Mark Rothko. In 1950 Congdon exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery with Clyfford Still, and in 1951 he exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1952 he exhibited at Duncan Phillips Gallery with Nicolas de Staël, and his work was also featured in exhibitions at the Whitney and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In the 1950s Congdon was recognized as one of the leading painters in the United States and quickly attained an international reputation as an Abstract Expressionist. In 1951 Time magazine published a long article on him, and his works were selling well, attracting the attention of major museums. But once again he turned his back on his homeland to go and live in Italy, mainly in Venice, where he befriended Peggy Guggenheim who became a collector of his paintings.
During the 1950s Congdon travelled extensively, but Venice was the city he chose as his home for most of this time. He had been there as a child, with his mother and brother. He admitted in the early 1960s that his return there after the tragedies of the war and his rejection of the “American dream” involved a complete rejection of “the material”. In Venice, Congdon was brought into contact with the great Venetian tradition that runs from Vittore Carpaccio to Francesco Guardi; and at the same time, he saw how modern painters – from J. M. W. Turner to [Claude Monet]- had rendered this incomparable subject. The quality of his St. Mark’s Squares, his Palazzi, his views of the less usual sights of Venice was soon recognized in America. His decade-long relationship with Venice was interrupted on occasion. Suddenly the city would cease to reveal itself to the artist, and the need to travel would make itself felt again.

unframed Excellent

14.25 x 14.25 x 1 in