SIDNEY GROSS 1921-1969
Composition #10, 1960
Oil on canvas, 84 X 65" (213.36 x 165. 10 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Gift of the Alpern Foundation in memory of Daniel Alpern, 961-0-127

Born in New York on February 9, 1921, Sidney Gross showed early promise as a painter of significance. He attended the Art Students League from 1939 to 1942, and taught there through most of the 1960s. He later became a professor of art at the University of Maryland. Beginning in 1949, his works have been in many solo exhibitions at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries, along with other exhibitions at prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design. He is represented in the collections of the museums such as the Corcoran Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Gross developed a range of styles, from realism in the 1930s, amorphisin in the 1940s, and finally into geometric expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s. These works represent the culmination of his development, and evoke more vivid emotion than all others. Their colors are striking, and their compositions forceful. Combining abstract elements with his unique spatial perspective, the artist allowed his forms to float against a solid background, while presenting to the viewer a central formal element of harmoniously placed color, simultaneously separated from and integrated into it. Composition #10 is an extraordinary embodiment of this technique, and it exhibits a characteristic Sidney Gross structure. The vertical drip marks provide the illusion of upward movement, cross-cut by a small but emphatic window f of blue sky with a wisp of white cloud, which contrasts to the lush greens of the central form. This is supported by the intrusion of black diagonals, which form yet another composition within the subject. Gross infuses the composition with small but strikingly colored geometric accents, which unify and balance the whole.
Gross had a vision, a novel approach to what he perceived, and was fully able to integrate the bold and the subtle to create his interpretation of what was in his mind. He employed several devices and merged them into a synchronous blend of spatial effects which can be seen in Composition #10. This painting contains a multitude of complexities which together yield a sense of totality, which is enhanced by the scale of this visionary creation. Gross was quite expert in his design, formatting his composition so that it would flow without dissonance. Every element appears inherently intertwined with another, and though there are several thematic levels operating at one time, they are definitively related, and all contribute to the end result.

CARL DAVID