"Absorbed By Color: Art In The 20th Century" At The Heckscher Museum Of Art

"Absorbed By Color: Art in the 20th Century" at the Hecksher Museum of Art, Huntington, Long Island (38 miles from NYC), explores the primacy of color over the past 100 years of painting as abstraction became a major force. Though relatively small, this exhibit includes works representing a wide variety of major 20th-century art movements (along with detailed signage): the vivid colors of the Fauves, the geometric designs of the Neoplasticists, the gestural action painting of the Abstract Expressionists and the intimations of the sublime in the Color Field painters. Regarding the latter, I was particularly struck by Carol Summers' "Kali Gandaki" (above), a woodcut whose washes of deep blues and greens evoke the majesty and mystery of this gorge in the Himalayas in Nepal.

"Absorbed By Color: Art in the 20th Century" will run through Dec. 2, 2012, at the Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Ave., Huntington, NY, (631) 351-3250, heckscher.org.