VVFA Modern | Artists | Robert Natkin (American, 1930 - 2010)

A painter of intensely colorful abstraction, Robert Natkin’s work often runs in series he created using columns, grids and shifting planes that include this early jazz oriented example titled Coltrane. These works, with vertical stripes alternating between thick and thin, decorative and textured, are cheerful and light, invoking a specific lyricism. His painting is inspired by the color used by Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, and the Cubism of Paul Klee.

Natkin was born in Chicago and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952. He married painter Judith Dolnick and they lived in Chicago where Natkin and a friend opened the Wells Street Gallery to give young Chicago artists a chance to market their artwork. The gallery operated from 1957 to 1959.

Natkin has been a Ford Foundation recipient and an artist-in-residence teaching at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Exhibitions
Whitney Museum of American Art, “Young Americans”, 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966-1968 (annuals)
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 1962-1966
Carnegie Institute, 1963
Houston Museum of Fine Art, 1963
San Francisco Museum of Art, 1969 (retrospective)

Collections
Museum of Modern Art
Guggenheim Museum
Whitney Museum of American Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Art
Houston Museum of Fine Art
Carnegie Institute
Rhode Island School of Design