Paintings
by Seymour Boardman at the AS Art Foundation
Seymour
Boardman majored in art at City College, N.Y. in 1938-1942. He
served in the U.S. Air Force from 1942-1946, during which he was
hospitalized for over a year due to a wound to his left shoulder,
which resulted in partial paralysis of the arm and hand.
After
a full medical discharge from the service in 1946, he left for
Paris to continue his art education at the Ecole des Beaux Arts,
Acadèmie de la Grand Chaumiere, and Atelier Fernand Leger.
Boardman's work became more abstract but still based on figure
and landscape. He returned to New York in 1949 and went to the
Art Students League.
Boardman
continued to paint dark, moody paintings using a limited palette
of black, white, grey, and an occasional additional color. In
1955, he had his first one-man show in New York at the Martha
Jackson Gallery. It was favorably reviewed by Hilton Kramer, Emily
Genauer, Fairfield Porter, and others. "inscrutable, dark,
mostly in blacks stained here and there with calm whitish shapes,
they yet manage to suggest something inhuman and romantic"
(N.Y.Times, March 26, 1955).
Throughout
the 1960s, Boardman showed at both the Stephen Radich Gallery
and the A.M. Sachs Gallery. In 1967, The Whitney Museum and the
Guggenheim Museums acquired a painting each. In the early 1970's
Boardman had a large exhibition of paintings at the Andrew Dickson
White Museum of Art at Cornell University. Thomas Levitt, the
Director, wrote in the catalogue, "Seymour Boardman has gradually
eliminated the arbitrary aspects of his work until only straight
lines and two or three areas of flat, usually somber, tones remain".
This accurately describes the paintings of that period and he
continued to work that way during the 1970's.
Since
the mid 1980's, Boardman has exhibited his work in several one-person
and group gallery shows. The paintings have changed, no longer
using acrylic, and returning to oil paint and a more painterly
surface. In 1992, Boardman had an important one-person show in
Buffalo, New York., and in 1999, a two-person gallery show with
the late Richards Ruben.
