Current Exhibitions

Born in San Mateo in 1923, Sam Francis began his painting career after a serious illness contracted while training in the Army Air Corps left him immobilized in a Northern California hospital for a few years. During this period of recuperation, Francis studied with the artist David Park, who later became a key figure of the Bay Area figurative movement. Painting became, for Francis, a “way back to life.” In the late 1940s, he returned to the University of California, Berkeley to study painting and art history before moving to Paris in 1950, where he remained for twelve years. He first traveled to Japan in 1957 and subsequently spent significant periods of his life there. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Francis was one of the most well-known American artists of his generation in Western Europe and Japan. The exhibition highlights Francis’ multifaceted connection to Palo Alto and the Anderson family. Though he was familiar with this area as it was his birthplace, it was not until the early 1970s that Francis began making frequent trips to Palo Alto from his home in Santa Monica to create prints at 3EP, a printing press founded by gallerist Paula Kirkeby, artist Joseph Goldyne, and collector Mary Margaret (Moo) Anderson. In 1986, Francis established his own studio near Stanford University, in a former spray shop for cars that he transformed into a work sanctuary. Francis’ artistic output energized Palo Alto during these decades, and his work became widely represented in local collections.

The celebrated oncologist and philanthropist Luther W. Brady bequeathed more than 130 works of art to the George Washington University representing a transformative gift to the GW Collection.  On view at the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, located in the Corcoran Flagg Building, the exhibit includes paintings and sculptures by internationally renowned artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Anthony Gormley, Nancy Graves, Richard Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Sean Scully, and Frank Stella. Among the featured pieces are Howard Hodgkin’s Heat (2003), Barbara Hepworth’s Autumn Day (1968), Jules Olitski’s Pleasures 3 (2001), and bronze maquettes by Henry Moore.  Showcasing Dr. Brady’s continuing impact on GW, the exhibit will bring works by important artists in close proximity to students and classes in the Corcoran School of Arts and Design. A triple alumnus of the George Washington University, Luther W. Brady built a remarkable legacy in medicine, academia, and the arts. Brady was a leading radiation oncologist who helped pioneer breakthrough treatments for eye tumors and cervical cancer. For more than 50 years, he imparted his experience and expertise to students at Hahnemann University School of Medicine and Drexel University College of Medicine. His bequest also included endowment funding for a radiation oncology professorship in the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Brady was a dedicated patron of the arts, serving on a number of museum boards and supporting prestigious institutions like the National Gallery of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Brady took an active role in the stewardship of the university and its institutions, serving on the GW Board of Trustees for over 20 years and sitting on the Board of Directors of the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum. Brady died in 2018 at age 92.

Yares Art is pleased to present the Gallery’s 60th anniversary exhibition memorializing its founder Riva Yares and her illustrious career that spanned over six decades. The history of modern and contemporary art is not only the story of artists, but also of visionary dealers who shaped its course. Riva Yares stands as a testament to this legacy. This exhibition features an acclaimed roster of fifty modern and contemporary artists whose works Yares exhibited and championed during her lifetime. Underscoring Riva’s remarkable legacy, the renowned art critic and poet, Edward Lucie-Smith has written: Her durable, long-standing commitment as an art dealer was derived from three unique personal qualities. First, she possessed great flair and financial shrewdness, and she supported the right artists at the right time. Second was the sheer force of her personality, something akin to a force of nature, fascinating, capricious, unpredictable — to borrow the apt phrase ‘a whim of iron.’ Third, and perhaps most important, is the fact that she was in love with art. Loving art is rather different from liking art. It implies a hunger for visual sensations. For Riva, this hunger was linked to a finely tuned discrimination. The revolving, five-month long exhibition will feature major works by Arman, Milton Avery, Johan Creten, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Dorothy Fratt, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Graham, Hans Hofmann, Yves Klein, Penelope Krebs, Morris Louis, Conrad Marca-Relli, Roberto Matta, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Manuel Neri, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Irene Rice Pereira, Larry Poons, Man Ray, Rotraut, David Smith, Jesús Rafael Soto, Frank Stella, Günther Uecker, and Esteban Vicente, among others. In 1964, Riva Yares founded Yares Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, setting forth on a journey that would leave an indelible mark in the Southwest. She expanded the footprint of the Gallery in 1987 by adding two floors, declaring: “This is a commercial gallery that has the look and feel of a well-run museum.” The Gallery’s second venue opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1991.The exhibitions that were presented in these two venues introduced Color Field painting, as well other notable Abstract Expressionist artists to new and diverse audiences in this region of the United States. Her contributions to this field is that much more impressive having left her son, Dennis, the charge to extend its presence in New York, where, in 2016, he founded and launched the Gallery’s third major venue in the prestigious Fifth Avenue and 57th location in midtown Manhattan.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 is the first major exhibition to examine the historical impact of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II, and delves into the various circles of artists who made France their home during an era of intense geopolitical realignment. This international loan exhibition showcases more than 130 works by approximately 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a moment of creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendancy of the New York City art scene. The exhibition covers a 17-year period beginning in 1946, when the U.S. Embassy in Paris began processing applications from ex-service members for the new GI Bill. A monthly stipend of $75 allowed many artists, such as Norman Bluhm, Ed Clark, Sam Francis, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Jack Youngerman, along with many whose work has not received the recognition it merits, such as Robert Breer, Harold Cousins, and Shinkichi Tajiri, to opt for a foreign rather than a domestic learning experience. Seasoned artists, such as Beauford Delaney, Claire Falkenstein, Carmen Herrera, Joan Mitchell, Kimber Smith, and Mark Tobey, like the GIs, were drawn to the storied modernist traditions that still flowed from this fabled City of Light. Intense experimentation among these closely knit, if shifting, circles of artists generated a variety of formal inventions and personal artistic styles. Because a good number of the works on view come from early in the artists’ careers, Americans in Paris contributes to the understanding of the development of many of the featured artists—dramatically so in the case of the abstract paintings by William Klein, works that preceded his experiments in photography and his later success as an art and commercial photographer and a filmmaker. Six years in the making, Americans in Paris is curated by the independent scholar Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert, and is accompanied by a 300-page illustrated publication.