Dimensions: 61 x 61 cm
signed, dated and inscribed on the reverse: 'Francis R Hewitt | "TREASURE TROVE" | 24" x 24" ACRYLIC ON | CANVAS BOARD | MAY 1965 LONDON'.
Origins
D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc.
institutional collection, Poland
DESA Unicum, 2015
Grazyna Kulczyk collection
Exhibited
Black/White and Gray Paintings 24" Square, Anonima Gallery, New York, January 1966
Anonima Group, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, February 1966
Anonima Group. Black/White and Gray Paintings, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, July 1966
Literature
Black, white and gray paintings, exhibition catalog, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 1966, cat. no. 10, p. 17 (list of works)
Artwork in the Anonym Group archive under 1964, available online: https://www.anonimagroup.org/works/1964 [accessed 13.11.2023].
Biography
The artist received higher education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1954-58. He took classes in the lithographic studio, where Ed Mieczkowski was an assistant, and they were united by their love of drawing. In 1960, together with Ernst Benkert, they formed the artist collective Anonima Group. He continued his education at Oberlin College, where he took a course in the history of color in Charles Parkhurst's class, which had a significant impact on his later work. Between 1960 and 1964, he and Mieczkowski took a course in technical drawing at the Cleveland Institute of Art, while also undertaking studies in aesthetics and the psychology of perception. In the second half of the 1960s, he traveled extensively in Europe, visiting Paris, Warsaw, Krakow and Zagreb, among others. One of his paintings was included in a famous op-art exhibition - "The Responsive Eye" at MoMA in 1965. After returning to New York, he continued to work with the Anonima Group and took up a research position at Pratt Institute. In the early 1970s, he moved to Vermont, where he taught at the university there until 1992. That same year, a monumental retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Robert Hull Fleming Museum in Vermont three months after his death. Hewitt's works are in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Caracas and the Museum of Art in Lodz, among others. In 1966, works by artists from the Anonima Group were exhibited at Warsaw's Foksal Gallery in an exhibition titled "Black, White and Gray Paintings." Presenting such radical exhibitions in communist Poland, the Foksal Gallery was considered one of the most important venues for avant-garde art in the world.
