Lena Mae Brillhart Abstract Expressionism Oil Painting, 1962

Item Details

Lena Mae Brillhart (American, 1925 – 2013)
Untitled (abstract expressionism), 1962
Oil painting on canvas
Signed to lower right

Lena Mae Brillhart was an active member and artist in her Texas community since the 1950s. Most notably, she was on the Founding Area Board of Amarillo Art Museum. Lena married a fellow artist and collector Herbert Clair Brillhart, Jr. In the mid 1950s, Lena Mae Brillhart met Dord Fitz (1914-1989), an artist, educator, and gallerist who had founded the Dord Fitz School of Art and the Dord Fitz Gallery in Amarillo, Texas, in 1953. In 1954, he established the Creative Arts Association, a group of art students and patrons from the Texas panhandle, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Fitz and his group (including Brillhart) would travel to New York to exhibit their work, and it was on one of these trips in 1956 that Fitz met the Abstract Expressionist Milton Resnick. Through Resnick he soon met Willem and Elaine deKooning, John Grillo, Mark Rothko, and others. By 1957, the enterprising Fitz arranged to put on an exhibition of his Abstract Expressionist friends’ works in Amarillo, thereby cementing the creative exchange between the contemporary New York art scene and the Texas panhandle. This exchange continued throughout the 1960s, as Fitz maintained close relationships with many of the leading New York artists, inviting them to lecture, teach, and exhibit at his gallery with the support of the Area Arts Foundation.

Condition

- stretcher abrasions and craquelure throughout canvas; accretions to canvas; chips, scratches and abrasions to frame.

Dimensions

Item #

ITMGG59698