I'm a strong believer that you can't paint nothing. There are many people who don't agree with that, but I really have to paint something, and even if you're a very abstract artist, the way I've gotten around that is to symbolize something and paint that.
Robert S. Neuman
The Visionary Eye of Allan Stone
Founded in 1960 by art dealer Allan Stone (1932–2006), the New York gallery known today as Allan Stone Projects has been admired for over half a century. Celebrated for its eclectic approach and early advocacy of pivotal artists of the 20th century, Allan Stone Gallery was a leading authority on Abstract Expressionism, the New York dealer for Wayne Thiebaud for over forty years, and showed the works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Joseph Cornell, John Graham and John Chamberlain. Stone also promoted the work of a younger generation of artists that were in conversation with other artists in his collection, working in the mediums of assemblage, collage and new modes of abstraction. In addition to modern masterworks and contemporary art, Allan Stone also collected and exhibited international folk art, Americana and important decorative arts and industrial design.
Robert S. Neuman was born in Kellogg, Idaho, in 1926. After an honorable discharge from the Air Force in 1946, he received his BA in 1949 and his MFA in 1951, both from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He moved from the Bay Area to the East Coast in 1957 where he began teaching art at SUNY New Paltz, then at Massachusetts College of Art, Brown University, and Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. He received a Fulbright Fellowship for Painting in 1953 and the John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1956. He has been the subject of countless exhibitions, including five solo shows in 2013. Neuman’s work has been on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is included in public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University. He died in June 2015.
During the 1950s, Neuman painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, incorporating the stylistic signifiers of the Bay Area School such as broad surface treatments, a full color palette, and atmospheric light. In the 1960s, Neuman's art evolved into geometric abstraction, fusing form and content that often verged on symbolism. He produced various bodies of works such as the Kandinsky-esque cosmos paintings of the 1970s and the complex allegories of the 1980s. Most recently he became interested in honoring the bygone landscape of Native Americans. Like his original Bay Area peers, Neuman was able to bridge his passion for pigment with abstraction, landscape, and most importantly, application of color.
Auction Results Robert S. Neuman
