ArtistNatkin, Robert

Artist Years1930-2010

Artist NationalityAmerican

TitleUntitled Composition IV

Year1986

MediumPrint > Color Lithography

DimensionsComposition: 42 X 30 inches
Sheet: 48 X 36 inches

Accession NumberRC447

NotesRobert Natkin, a painter who rose to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s with work that blended Abstraction with Post-Impressionist colors, died on April 20 in Danbury, Conn. He was 79 and lived in Redding, Conn. The cause was a bacterial blood infection that developed during a hospital stay after a fall, said his wife, Judith Dolnick.

Mr. Natkin layered bright acrylic colors and forms on large-scale canvases, exuding the playfulness of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky with the palettes of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. He used cloths and netting as stencils to achieve textures described by John Russell of The New York Times in 1978 as having a “worked-over look that suggests that the painting has been traversed over and over by a very small truck that has just had its tires retreaded.”

His paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Mr. Natkin could be mischievous. “You need to look at a painting with the tongue of your eye,” he was known to say, and once he actually did lick a painting, a Vermeer at the Frick Collection, making sure the guards did not see him, recalled his daughter, Leda Natkin Nelis. In another instance, one confirmed by several people, she said he removed a painting by Nicolas Poussin from a wall inside the Art Institute of Chicago, hid it behind a velvet curtain and replaced it with one of his own. When no one took notice of the prank, she said, he switched them back.

Robert Joseph Natkin was born in Chicago on Nov. 7, 1930. His parents made their living in the garment industry, and despite their lack of support for his interest in art — his mother even pressured his high school art teacher to flunk him, his family said — he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“If a teacher said you shouldn’t use black paint, that you should mix red, yellow and blue instead, he would use black and show you that it was the most beautiful color in the world,” said Ernest Dieringer, an artist who met Mr. Natkin at the school.

Mr. Natkin married Ms. Dolnick, also a painter, in 1957, six weeks after they met. Without a place to display their work, the couple renovated a storefront in a run-down stretch of the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago and turned it into the Wells Street Gallery, where they displayed their art. The photographer Aaron Siskind and the sculptor John Chamberlain also had shows there.

Two years later they joined a group of other artists from Chicago in an exodus to New York, where Mr. Natkin began teaching and exhibiting his paintings. The art critics Sister Wendy Beckett and Peter Fuller both championed his work.

Mr. Natkin moved to Redding in 1970. Besides his wife and daughter, who lives in London, Mr. Natkin is survived by a son, J. P. Natkin, of Irvington, N.Y., and five grandchildren.

Though he exhibited in some of the most eminent galleries of his time, his style fell out of favor in the art world. Later in life he sold most of his canvases directly from his studio. In a profile in The New York Times in 1979, Mr. Natkin reflected on his life spent in the studio. “It’s full of the voices of my paintings,” he said, “of all the victories and defeats I’ve known there.”
(source: NY Times Obituary, 27 April 2010)

Price $2,200.00

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