Object Type: Sculpture

Medium and Support: oil on wood, stone

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum; Gift of Elizabeth McManus

Accession Number: 2013.10

Alongside his friend Piet Mondrian, Harry Holtzman practiced Neoplasticism, an artistic philosophy that rejected representation in favor of a new approach that took art back to its roots in the most elemental and abstract colors and lines, while also considering its holistic integration with daily life.
In the early 1980s, Harry Holtzman visited gallery owner Sidney Janis with whom he had collaborated in the past. Janis asked Holtzman about his work. Holtzman replied that after 40 years dedicated to projects that included serving as Mondrian’s heir, he had returned to the studio and had made exciting new discoveries. Prompted for more details, Holtzman responded simply, “I’m making the first paintings in history.”
Although Holtzman called his late works “paintings,” they feature a distinctive combination of sculpture and painting. Constructed in his Lyme studio home (once a cavernous barn) and painted on thin planes of wood, Holtzman’s geometric compositions are informed by the work he made
 in the 1940s—work Piet Mondrian had praised for its revolutionary move from two dimensions into three. The description of this piece as an open relief refers to the way the piece can appear both flat and two-dimensional, or three dimensional in the way it interacts with its environment as the viewer moves around it. Using bold primary colors connected by
 a narrow grid of black lines, the artist captured the uncertain equilibrium of an object carefully balanced in space. The sculptures’ rough stone bases were fabricated from materials Holtzman collected around his home.
If Holtzman’s earliest sculptures were carefully situated in space, his last works responded to the light, texture, and materials of the place of Lyme, Connecticut, where he spent many productive years before his 1987 death.