Grid Painter and Art Patron Dies at 83

Tony Bechara, an artist who was beloved in New York for his intricately crafted grid work and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, died on Wednesday on his 83rd birthday. His dying was confirmed by El Museo del Barrio, which didn’t state a trigger.

For the reason that Seventies, Bechara repeatedly painted multihued grids utilizing a way that was as rigorous because the idea behind it. His mind-bending, eye-popping canvases sought to know summary notions reminiscent of randomness and managed chaos, and although maybe much less well-known than different experiments within the medium by his New York colleagues, these works have since emerged as a number of the most cutting-edge painterly experiments finished in an period when portray was generally pronounced useless.

However Bechara’s contributions to town’s artwork scene prolong far past what could be proven in galleries and museums. For 18 years, he was board chair at El Museo del Barrio, a museum that makes a speciality of Caribbean and Latin American artwork, and he was additionally a trustee on the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Rail.

He additionally was instrumental in stoking better curiosity within the work of the painter Carmen Herrera, considered one of his associates, previous to her dying in 2022. When Herrera acquired a Whitney Museum survey in 2016, Bechara was amongst these thanked within the credit for it.

Bechara thought-about his patronage of arts establishments and his promotion of different artists part of his follow all the identical. Of these actions, he told AzureAzure, “They’re an extension of my dedication to artwork, like unfinished murals through which I work in the course of the night time.”

By day, he labored on his work, which he made by way of a course of that concerned repeatedly taping and un-taping his canvases, then filling in varied areas with brightly coloured acrylic. Hundreds of quarter-inch squares consequence, nestled collectively to type huge grids.

Talking to his good friend, Brooklyn Rail editor Phong Bui, he as soon as described his course of this manner: “It begins with taping one layer on the entire canvas vertically, then proceeds the identical horizontally. The subsequent factor is to use the chosen shade with a small brush, then take away the tape. Repeat this similar course of on the unpainted squares yet one more time vertically, then horizontally, then apply the final layer of colours. What I really like is the levels of shock each time; to take every layer of tape off the canvas is to disclose new worlds of optical symphony.”

This symphonic aesthetic differentiated Bechara’s work from contemporaneous Minimalist experiments made in the course of the Seventies. Whereas these works have been chilly and unfeeling, Bechara’s artwork is overflowing with shade. It additionally slyly finds methods of exceeding its inflexible construction, with some squares barely exceeding their body and others flowing onto the edges of his canvases. Critic John Yau lately famous that Bechara’s course of “undermines any sense of stability that we affiliate with a grid.”

To up to date eyes, these work seem like laptop screens, with every sq. performing as one thing like a pixel. However Bechara began producing the grid work in the course of the early Seventies, at a time once they wouldn’t have had that connotation. On the time, he as an alternative believed his work would assist him perceive the character of notion.

“Since I’ve the grid as a construction,” he advised Bui, “I belief every portray to inform me what to do, the best way to be extra random, or much less random. It’s at all times the shock ingredient that I discover alluring.”

Tony Bechara in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1942. His mom hailed from Majorca, Spain; his father, from Beirut. Bechara attended college in San Juan, then was despatched by his mother and father to prep college on the New York Army Academy. At his mother and father’ urging, he studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate pupil at Georgetown College, then re-enrolled as a graduate pupil. His mother and father “didn’t consider I may make a dwelling being an artist,” he advised the Brooklyn Rail, noting that they actually needed him to change into a lawyer.

Bechara efficiently persuaded his mother and father to then let him spend two years finding out historical past on the Sorbonne in Paris, then to let him journey throughout Western Europe. He returned to New York, attending NYU’s worldwide relations graduate program.

Then he began drifting towards artwork, initially creating figurative work in his spare time. In the end, in 1967, he enrolled on the Faculty of Visible Arts, the place his professors included painters reminiscent of Robert Mangold and Malcolm Morley, in addition to the artwork historian Lucy Lippard. Impressed by Italian Neorealist motion pictures, he began to color black-and-white figurative imagery, and he even thought briefly of turning into a filmmaker himself.

He grew interested by opticality, and his head started to swim with ideas of sights seen and works skilled: work by Titian and Tintoretto considered in Italy; Publish-Impressionist works by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac encountered in France, together with the colour theories of M. E. Chevreul that impressed them; mosaics and calligraphy seen on the Alhambra in Spain. He was thus on his approach to portray his grids.

These grid work started displaying up in some distinguished locations. Bechara appeared within the 1975 Whitney Biennial. Then, a decade later, he was given a solo present at El Museo del Barrio.

Bechara turned chair of El Museo del Barrio in 1996 and helped steer the museum via a interval when it confronted criticism. Some within the surrounding neighborhood claimed that, in increasing its purview to focus more and more on Latin America, the establishment had stopped caring as a lot about Puerto Rican artwork, its preliminary space of focus. Bechara dismissed these claims, telling the New York Times, “If the criticism is that we’re not an ethnocentric gallery, then that’s honest. However our ambition and our mission demand that we change into a world-class museum, open to all folks.”

He weathered a unique type of controversy in 2013, when Margarita Aguilar filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights, claiming that she had confronted discrimination when she was let go as El Museo del Barrio’s director. In her preliminary lawsuit, Aguilar claimed Bechara had mentioned she and one other workers member have been “performing like hysterical girls” when Aguilar tried to fireside an worker. Bechara denied this, and the lawsuit was in the end dismissed.

Though he left his submit in 2016, Bechara remained a key determine for the museum, donating $1 million in 2019 in help of its curatorial and schooling departments.

“Tony’s passing is a rare loss for El Museo del Barrio and for your entire arts group,” Patrick Charpenel, El Museo del Barrio’s present director, mentioned in an announcement. “He was a pressure of nature. His imaginative and prescient and management helped pave the way in which for what El Museo is at present, and his legacy will proceed to encourage generations to return.”

In the meantime, lately, extra consideration has been paid to his artwork than ever earlier than. The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork acquired its first Bechara portray in 2023. The subsequent yr, he joined the roster of Lisson Gallery.

All of the whereas, he continued portray. Requested about his late-career work in 2015 by AzureAzure, he mentioned, “As I create my work, I’m obsessively pushed to the seek for the divine accident … what we name a Eureka second … that unknown path that, as poetry or music says, is barely discovered as you stroll via it.