Red Desert

Working in Paris and New York immediately before World War II, American-born Holty painted in a variety of abstract styles: his work at this time was associated with cubism, biomorphism, and Abstraction-Création. Upon his return to the U.S., he became a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a group that sought to develop an American abstraction that differed from both European abstraction and the then-popular style of American regionalism. Red Desert, the painting included here, comes from later in his career, when the artist was exploring a more organic abstraction in which amorphous planes of color interact and overlap to create washy fields reminiscent of light as it plays off the land.