COURTESY HOLLIS TAGGART, NEW YORK
Hollis Taggart, a New York–based gallery that specializes in American art, has added the estates of Michael Corinne West and Leon Berkowitz to its roster. The enterprise has planned exhibitions of work by Berkowitz and West for September and November, respectively.
Like some of her peers in the Abstract Expressionist movement, West took up a masculine name in the hopes of avoiding gender-based discrimination in the art world. Her paintings, which often featured large and intense brushstrokes, were exhibited alongside works by Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and others at the Pinacotheca Gallery in New York in 1945. She had solo shows at New York’s Uptown Gallery in 1957 and Domino Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1958.
Berkowitz founded the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts in 1945. Though his early works include some figural elements, he is best known for his abstract pieces focused on color, gradients, and light, and, during the 1970s, he became associated with the artists of California’s Light and Space Movement. Berkowitz showed work at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. His art is part of collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, among other institutions.
Hollis Taggart, the founder of the gallery, said in a statement, “We are delighted to bring the estates of Michael West and Leon Berkowitz into our program. And more importantly, we look forward to enhancing knowledge of and fostering new dialogues on these two gifted artists, who have both made substantive contributions to the development of art history.”