Leon Dabo: Light Fall

In a special companion exhibition to a suite of new work by Bay Area artist Joseph Goldyne, Sullivan Goss will mount a show of Tonal paintings by LEON DABO (1864-1960). LIGHT FALL will be the gallery’sfirst exhibition to focus exclusively on Dabo’s Tonalist paintings. Early on in the artist’s career, these were his most widely collected works. Several of the paintings have extensive exhibition histories, and one of the paintings – Rain Cloud, c. 1905 – is the only painting in the Artist’s Estate known to have been exhibited in California during the artist’s lifetime. Light Fall will examine the way that dawn and dusk light fall on landscapes rich with atmosphere.

Leon Dabo was a highly successful artist whose career as an easel painter began its phenomenal rise after an exhibition at the National Arts Club in New York in 1905. From that first exhibition until the end of the Great War, his muted, dreamy paintings of the Hudson River were prized by the kinds of collectors who could put Dabo in the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Louvre.

In 1913, a small group of progressive artists got together in Dabo’s studio to bring an exhibition called the International Exhibition of Modern Art to the Armory in New York. “The Armory Show” was to be the most important exhibition of the twentieth century. It changed the trajectory of painting and “modern” painting in particular. So many of the late nineteenth century’s most avant garde movements – Dabo’s among them – were spotlit at the Armory before the dazzle of the twentieth century’s new styles caused them to fade from view. Their revival took many forms. Some of the visual ideas made their way back in the work of color field painters like Mark Rothko, while the revival of interest in historical Tonalist painting began in the 1970s.

You can preview the exhibition HERE.

Come to the opening. Visit, explore, collect! 1st Thursday, September 7, 2017 from 5 -­ 8pm.