The
Ten Whitney Dissenters
At the 1981 memorial service for Louis Schanker friends and relatives were
appropriately surrounded by his works. He died at the age of 78 only blocks away
from the Martin Diamond Gallery on Madison Avenue, (where the memorial was
held,)
during a successful show of his oils and sculpture. Ilya Bolotowsky a long time friend
and fellow painter with a large, white, handlebar moustache related how he had
envisioned the formation of a new group. He
said that he enlisted Lou to get people
together because of his wide circle of friends.
A page from Schanker’s sketchpad
lists the members of the group in his hand.
They included: Lou Schanker,
Ilya Bolotowsky, Ben-Zion, Marcus
Rothkowitz, Adolph Gottlieb, Joe Solomon,
Tschacbasov, Lou Harris, Ralph Rosenborg. A
tenth guest artist, Yankel Kufeld,
participated in many shows to round out the group. Marcus Rothkowitz later
shortened
his name to Mark Rothko.
In
the catalog from a show at Mercury Gallery in 1937 their mission is described
as, “a protest against the reputed equivalence of American painting and
literal painting.”
[Interview
with Bernard Braddon and Sidney Schectman, owners of Mercury Gallery
Conducted by Avis Berman At New York, New York 1981 October 9 for
Smithsonian, Archives of American Art
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/braddo81.htm
]
They
were variously described as expressionist, radical, cubist, and experimentalist.
Schanker and Bolotowsky were in the awkward position of having their
works included
at the Whitney simultaneously with “The Ten” exhibits. The group demonstrated a
social consciousness by mounting an exhibit for the American League Against
War
and Fascism to benefit Spanish children. In addition to the Mercury Gallery
they exhibited
at the Montross, Bonestell and
Georgette Passedoit galleries in Manhattan and the
Galerie Bonaparte in France.
two-dimensional objective in this type of composition, there is a plasticity in
the forms
and a gamut of quivering color in their description which make it an outstanding
painting
of this show [at Georgette Passedoit Gallery].
Art
News, 1937