Mongolian Prince
Sam Spanier (1925-2008)
“Romantic, darkly lyrical, the images are shadowed with a tender brooding but emanate a Byzantine richness; the areas of color emerge through films of translucent and semi-opaque tones which smolder and smoke around the lighter, fire-hot passages.”
– Sam Feinstein in a 1955 review of Spanier’s work for Art Digest
One of the 20th century’s great colorists
Spanier’s developing spiritual life is richly reflected in his later work, from the mid-1970s to the final years of his life, and it is even more manifest in the radiant explosion that has occurred of the color and light which were smoldering in the early works. The heavy, obstructing ambivalence of gestural black in the early works has receded to cloisonné lines enclosing figures and forms that range from single Rouault-like portraits and abstract figures, to landscapes redolent with sunlight… moreSam Spanier’s short biograph