(Audio Commentary)

Paul Burlin

American (New York, N.Y., 1886-1969, New York, N.Y.)

untitled

lithograph

1982.001.020

By the time he contributed this gestural abstract print to Artists & Writers Protest, Burlin was 83 years old and had only recently been given an exhibit of his abstract work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but he was not a late bloomer. At the age of 27 in 1913, he had work in the famous Armory Show, the first major exhibition of international modernist painting and sculpture in the United States. His career encompassed colorful and energetic abstraction and semi-abstraction inspired by surrealist and Native American sources. In the last decade of his life, he limited his palette and simplified his gestures.