The best of 1960s and 1970s American abstraction from coast to coast

The works comprising Mel & Martha Horowitzes’ remarkable collection of post-war American art have been in the couple’s possession for more than half a century. And yet, many of their most significant pieces, whether Ed Ruscha’s Pressures (1967) or Philip Guston’s Red Black (1958), are hardly strangers to the public eye. The couple, who hailed from Wisconsin, and lived in California and South Carolina, where Mel grew up, frequently loaned masterpieces from their collection with the goal of presenting the full picture of the American post-war period to the public. New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, California’s La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and North Carolina’s Asheville Art Museum and Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte are amongst the prestigious institutions where the Horowitzes’ works were shown.

This spring, Christie’s will present exceptional works from the Mel & Martha Horowitz Collection across three sales: Post-War to Present on 27 February, Prints and Multiples on 15-16 April and American Paintings on 17 April. ‘This collection transcends region. It really showcases the best and most relevant local contemporary art scenes. Many great mid-century California collections might have a John McLaughlin or an Ed Ruscha, but they wouldn’t likely also have artists from the Washington Color School, like Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam and Anne Truitt,’ says Julian Ehrlich, Head of Christie’s Post-War to Present sale. Following the evolution from gestural abstraction to Minimalism, the Horowitzes selected the best and most relevant artists across movements. ‘Today you see collections assembled in this way, but the Horowitzes were ahead of their time.’

The Horowitzes’ ties to artists from California to the Carolinas

While artists such as Ruscha and Guston had already garnered art-world acclaim in 1960s and 1970s when the Horowitzes began collecting, the couple also embraced burgeoning artists like Gilliam and Truitt. Adding to the collection’s prestige, many of the works were acquired at the time of execution or shortly thereafter. Given their close relationships with prominent gallerists and friendships with artists including Jasper Johns and McLaughlin, the Horowitzes acquired top pieces from cutting-edge talents, compiling the ultimate capsule of American post-war collecting.

Mel’s love of art began as a child via visits to the Greenville County Museum of Art. After meeting and marrying Martha, Mel moved with his wife to San Diego to start his medical practice, where McLaughlin’s wife, Florence, became one of his patients. Throughout their lives, the Horowitzes formed deep ties to artistic communities on both coasts, and their collection shines a light on how the Carolinas in particular have influenced the artistic canon. Their significant holdings of Noland, an Asheville native, along with Jules Olitski, an Asheville transplant, reveal the profound influence the area has had on contemporary art. An exceptional group of lithographs and reliefs by South Carolinian Jasper Johns further accentuates this point.

Ed Ruscha’s early word-painting masterpiece

Anchoring the Horowitz collection is Ruscha’s Pressures, acquired directly from Alexander Iolas Gallery. This work was included in the artist’s first retrospective in 1982, touring the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

‘Pressures is ambiguous — pressure can be construed as negative or positive. For example, pressure makes a diamond. Ruscha is always playing with this ambiguity,’ says Ehrlich. ‘The text has its own meaning, almost a rhythm, but it also becomes a visual element of the abstraction.’ Painted just after his triumphant series of masterpieces including OOF, Annie and the Standard Station series, Pressures finds Ruscha at his most innovative and experimental. It’s also one of only seven word paintings from 1967, just before the artist took a multi-year pause from painting to explore other media.

Philip Guston’s exemplary abstract gouache

Another key work is Guston’s gouache Red Black, from the artist’s celebrated abstract period. A leader of the New York School alongside Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, Guston’s star was on the rise. He had been invited to the São Paolo Biennials of 1957-1959, featured in the foundational New American Painting exhibition of 1958-1959 and received a Ford Foundation grant in 1959. Made in the same period as the artist’s seminal The Clock (now in the collection of MoMA), Red Black is imbued with a decade’s worth of painterly reflection, whilst simultaneously anticipating Guston’s later return to figuration, as well as his preferred colour palette of reds, oranges, blues, greys and blacks.

Anne Truitt’s powerful prism

Moving towards the minimal, Truitt’s Foxleigh I is a standout sculpture in the Horowitz collection and an exceptional example of the artist’s mature work. Struck by the works of Noland and Frank Stella at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s 1961 American Expressionists Imagists exhibition, Truitt endeavoured to distil the power of these paintings into three dimensional columns.

One of only ten early works by the artist ever to come to auction, Foxleigh I is a stunning example of Truitt’s revolutionary unification of painting and sculpture. Standing on a hidden plinth at the sculpture’s base, the work appears to levitate. The Horowitzes acquired the sculpture the same year that it was made, 1975, which was also one year after Truitt’s first-ever museum retrospective in 1973-74 at the Whitney. In a letter to the collectors, the artist details how Foxleigh I — consisting of two colour planes: one indigo, the other grape purple — should be installed: ‘I would suggest a low, narrow wooden railing isolating the sculpture into its own space, say ½” x ½”, or even ¼” x ¼”; the principal aim is just to isolate it…These sculptures tend to spread into whatever space is offered them.’

Whether Ruscha’s word paintings or Robert Mangold’s minimalist geometric vocabulary, the Mel & Martha Horowitz Collection illustrates not only the breadth of American abstraction, but also the unmatched experimental spirit of the 1960s and ’70s.