Walter Darby Bannard

Walter Darby Bannard (September 23, 1934 – October 2, 2016) was an American abstract painter.
Biography.
Bannard was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter Academy (class of 1952) and Princeton University, where he struck up a friendship and working relationship with Frank Stella, who was also interested in minimalist abstraction. He was associated with Modernism, Lyrical Abstraction, Minimalism, Formalism (art), Post-painterly Abstraction and Color Field painting.
Bannard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968.
Bannard had close to a hundred solo exhibitions, was included in several hundred group shows, and is represented in the collections of all the major New York museums and many others around the world. He was a prolific writer on art with over a hundred published essays and reviews; Bannard has taught, lectured and participated in panel discussions, and has been a Co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Bannard was Professor and Head of Painting of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami. Bannard died in Miami, Florida on October 2, 2016 at the age of 82.
Work.
Art.
Bannard's paintings from 1959 to 1965 contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-1960s. The critic Phyllis Tuchman wrote about these works, "These colors are still radiant. And the artist’s pale palette is as uniquely personal today as it was fifty years ago. You can’t even apply a name to his hues."
In the late 1960s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms.
Writing.
Bannard's numerous essays appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and many other publications, including museum catalogs. He curated and wrote the catalog for the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Hans Hofmann, at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Bannard's writings are collected at the Walter Darby Bannard Archive.
Selected group exhibitions.
"Post Painterly Abstraction" (Los Angeles County Museum, Walker Art Center, and Toronto Art Museum) 
"The Responsive Eye" (Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., and tour of U.S. Museums) 1965 
Chicago Art Museum
University of Pennsylvania
"American Painters" Smithsonian Institution
Museum of Modern Art Embassies Program
Whitney Museum Annual, New York
"Color, Image and Form," Detroit Institute of Arts
"Art of the Real," Museum of Modern Art and tour of European and American museums
Corcoran Biannual, Washington, D.C.
"The Development of Modernist Painting: Jackson Pollock to the Present," Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis
Whitney Museum Annual, N.Y.
"One Tendency of Contemporary Art," Kunstmarkt, Cologne
Venice Biennale, “American Artists”
"Two Generations of Color Painting," University of Pennsylvania
"Color and Field, 1890 - 1970," Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Dayton Art Institute, and Cleveland Museum of Art
"The Form of Color," Toledo Museum of Art
"The Structure of Color," Whitney Museum
Fogg Art Museum 
"Six Painters," Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Milwaukee Art Center
"Toward Color and Field," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Whitney Museum Annual, N.Y.
"Abstract Painting in the '70s," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
"Painting and Sculpture Today - 1972," Indianapolis Museum of Art
"Masters of the Sixties," Edmonton Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery
"Acquisitions," Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.
"Bannard, Goodnough, Noland, Olitski, Poons, Stella," Galerie and Edition Merian, Krefeld, Germany
"American Art," Cornell University, 1972
"9 American Painters," Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
"Curator's Choice," New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Morris Museum, Morristown, N.J. 
"11 American Artists," Musee D'Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada
"The Michener Collection, American Paintings of the 20th Century," U. of Texas, Austin
"The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
"Contemporary American Artists," the Cleveland Museum of Art
"Continuing Abstraction in American Art," Whitney Museum
"American Art Since 1945, from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art," travelling to various U.S. Museums
Gallerie Ulysses, Vienna, Austria, February 
"Cronaca," Galleria Civica, Modena, Italy, March
"Private Images: Photographs by Painters," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, January
"Painting and Sculpture Today 1978," Indianapolis Museum of Art, June
"15 Sculptors in Steel Around Bennington 1963 - 1978," Park-McCullough House, Bennington, VT, August - October
"Art in America After World War II" Guggenheim Museum, January - February 
Knoedler Galleries
International Communications Agency, Washington, D.C.
Sheldon Memorial Gallery, Kansas City MO, 
"Recent Trends in Collecting: 20th Century Painting from the National Museum of Art", National Collection of American Art, Washington DC 
"National Midyear Exhibition," Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 
"Twentieth Century Art from the Metropolitan Museum: Selected Recent Acquisitions," The Queens Museum, Flushing, NY 
"Directions in Contemporary American Ceramics," Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 
"Definitive Statements - American Art: 1964 - 1966," List Art Center, Brown University 
"Free Market," Galerie 1900/2000, Paris, France,
"The Moffett Collection," Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Fall
"Stars in Florida," Fort Lauderdale Art Museum, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 
"Abstractions and Monochromes", Galeria de Poche, Paris, France
"The Denver Art Museum, 1883-1993", Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado
Award of Merit, Hortt 37 Juried Exhibition, Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art
Award of Merit, Hortt 38 Juried Exhibition, Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art
“Masters of the Masters” Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown. Ohio,
Masters of the Masters” Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio 
“The Rowan Collection: Passion and Patronage - Painting in Los Angeles and New York”, Mills College Art Museum, Mills College, Oakland, Cal.
"Clement Greenberg: A Critics Collection", Portland Art Museum, Portland Oregon 
"Color field Revisited: Paintings from the Albright Knox Art Gallery". Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University , Milwaukee Wisc 
"Minimalist Painting", installation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., Fall 
"Modernism and Abstraction" Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA: 
"Hans Hofmann: The Legacy", The Painting Center, New York 
"Meaning and Metaphor", Syracuse University Art Gallery
"Born in the USA" National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 2007
"Color as Field", Denver Art Museum, 2007
"Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art", Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 
"Color into Light", Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 
"Circa 1959: Transitions in the Work of Nine Abstract Painters", Jacobson-Howard Gallery, New York 
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, "Art Since 1945: In a New Light"
"Darby Bannard and the Miami School", Center for Visual Communication, Miami FL, Oct. 9 2010 - Jan 22, 2011
"Abstract USA '58 - '68", Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Sept 11, 2010 - Feb 20, 2011 (YELLOW ROSE 1959, THE HOURS 1958)
MONO, POLY, CONCRETE, Galerie Konzette, Vienna, Austria, October 23 -November 21, 2011
NATURE AND THE NON-OBJECTIVE REALM, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, Visginia, March 10, 2011 – November 27, 2011
COLOR FIELD REVISED, Loretta Howard Gallery, NYC, June 4 – August 5 2011
List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge MA, “Selections from the Collection”
Daum Museum. Sedalia Missouri, “The First Decade”
Loretta Howard Gallery NYC, “January White Sale” 
Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, “Art Los Angeles Contemporary”, 
"20 Shades of Grey", Zadok Gallery, Miami, Florida, May 11 - July 26, 2013. FIREWALKER 2011, SOCKO 2012
"Paintings and Prints by Contemporary Notables", Watson Macrae Gallery, Sanibel, Florida, Dec 10, 2013 -