Herbert Gentry: Paris and Beyond 1949-1978

Author: Gretchen Wagner
Publisher: Ryan Lee Gallery, NY
Year: 2021
Pages: 78

Herbert Gentry: Paris and Beyond 1949-1978, accompanies an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Herbert Gentry. Spanning from 1949 to 1978, the exhibition surveys the European years of a remarkable career that bridged the Atlantic and resulted in culturally important works reflecting the artist’s cultural fluidity, artistic innovation, and lifelong position as an art community leader. This will be the gallery’s first exhibition of Gentry’s work, in cooperation with the artist’s estate.

A Harlem native, Gentry was an important figure in the post-war European art scene, which he marked via his own vividly gestural canvases, and his remarkable role in fostering transcontinental relations between American artists and their European counterparts. “Gentry was among those American painters in Paris, who, beginning in the early 1950s, helped introduce the American concept of gesture, free invention, and the vivid dissonances of color to the European sensibilities,” Romare Bearden wrote in 1982, “The style was then known in Paris as ‘the school of the pacific’ and, in this country, of course, as ‘Abstract Expressionism.’”