ARTIST OVERVIEW

Hans Burkhardt (1904–1994) was a Swiss-born artist whose paintings and works on paper prefigured the rise of abstract expressionism in America and who was an early proponent of European modernism, specifically cubism, in southern Californian artistic circles. Recognized for its profound and deeply felt humanism, his art, unlike the painting of his east coast peers, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky, which dealt primarily with formal concerns, does not shy away from political statement. This position is strongly evinced in the series of antiwar paintings for which he is best known today.

Burkhardt immigrated to the United States in 1924. The Armenian émigré modernist painter Arshile Gorky, became an influential mentor and friend, and the two artists shared a studio in Greenwich Village for nine years. Like Gorky, Burkhardt worked out of the cubist tradition. His synthesis of cubism and a nascent abstract expressionist approach is highly evident in his figure drawings, which expand frieze-like to cover the entire picture plane and which emphasize both the angled geometry and the lithe sinuosity of the human figure. Today, these works on paper, done in charcoal or pastel on paper, are prized by curators and collectors for their intensity and dynamism.

In 1937, Burkhardt left New York for Los Angeles, where he came into contact with a group of surrealists that included Man Ray, Knud Merrild, and Eugene Berman. His distance from the New York art scene, coupled with the more diverse and less doctrinaire atmosphere of the west coast, allowed Burkhardt to pursue a varied and experimental career. War and man's inhumanity to man remained a central concern of Burkhardt's painting for over forty years, beginning with his 1940s paintings on the Spanish Civil War on through World War II and Vietnam. His collage paintings from the late sixties through the 1980s feature embedded skulls and are an eloquent plea for social and political reform.

In 1992, two years before his death, Burkhardt was honored for his lifetime of achievement in art by the American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York. As a teacher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, he influenced scores of younger Californian artists. Burkhardt's work is held in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the British Museum, London, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon.