A leading figure in the development of Color Field painting in the late 1950s and an important American abstract painter, Walter Darby Bannard (better known as Darby Bannard) was committed to color-based and expressionist abstraction for over five decades. During his undergraduate years at Princeton University, he joined fellow students, the painter Frank Stella and the critic and art historian Michael Fried, in conversations that expanded aesthetic definitions and led to an emphasis on opticality as the defining feature of pictorial art. Bannard continued to explore attributes of color, paint, and surface through innovative methods, striving throughout his career for vital and original expressive means. He was also an important writer on formalist issues in art, serving as an editor for Artforum and a contributor to Art International. His extensive publications date from the 1960sto the end of hislife. In the early 1990s, Bannard moved to Miami where he served as professor and head of painting at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. Bannard was born in 1934 in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Princeton University in 1956. Bannard, who made drawings and watercolors throughout his youth, was self-taught as a painter. He derived inspiration for his earliest paintings from the art of William Baziotes, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still. By the late 1950s, he had turned from an expressionistic style to working with large areas of contrasting color, creating austere minimal paintings. In the next decade, he was one of the first artiststo blend artist’s materials with commercially produced tinted alkyd resin house paints in a search for greater color options. In 1964, he was included in the landmark exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction, organized by Clement Greenberg and held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first solo exhibitions were in 1965, at Kasmin Gallery, London; Richard Feigen Gallery, Chicago; and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. He was also included that year in the Museum of Modern Art’s, The Responsive Eye. In 1968, Bannard received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a National Foundation of the Arts Award. In about 1970, Bannard’s focus shifted to an exploration of the liquid quality of paint. Drawn to the new acrylic mediums that were becoming available, he began working on the floor using thick gel surfaces and color suspended in Magna or polymer mediums. At the time, he “thought of color as a liquid, flowing over and settling on a roughened surface, changing as it mixed and dried.” His method involved stapling his canvases to slightly raised wooden platforms. After tightly sizing his canvases, he scraped on colored gel with squeegee-like tools. When the surface was dry, he poured colored polymer over it in layers, allowing the paint to find its place. He was drawn at the time to close-valued rather than strong colors and often allowed his pale warm grounds to serve as colors in their own right rather than acting as supports for other colors. Karen Wilkin stated in Color as Field (2007): “Bannard probed just how subtle chromatic nuances could be before they became unbroken expanse. In these pictures, even composition could be reduced to a kind of near-negative, an echo of something no longer there.” (p. 61) In the late 1970s, Bannard was instrumental in the retrospective exhibition of the work of Hans Hofmann. He curated the 1976-77 exhibition and wrote the catalogue that accompanied it.

Public Collections

Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock
Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Canada
Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi
Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina
Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain
Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Dallas Museum of Art, Texas
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
Denver Art Museum, Colorado
Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada
Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina
Grey Art Gallery, New York University
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York
Honolulu Museum, Hawaii
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Kenyon College Art Gallery, Ohio
LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia
Lawrenceville School Art Museum, New Jersey
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Miami University Art Museum, Florida
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
New Jersey State Museum, Trenton
Newark Museum, New Jersey
Neuberger Museum of Art, Harrison, New York
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Portland Museum of Art, Maine
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts
Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York
The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Winnipeg Art Gallery, Canada
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey