Robert Natkin was one of the most important abstract painters of his generation. Working alongside the Abstract Expressionists during the 60’s and 70’s, Natkin shunned the Downtown Manhattan art scene to find his own way in the idyllic serenity of Redding, CT, where he had his studio and home for more than 40 years - from 1960 until his passing at Danbury hospital in 2010.
The tumultuous nature of NYC’s art culture went contrary to Natkin’s meditative approach and his profound inner search for the magic of childhood. Natkin recalls a recurring dream he had as a child, where he dives into an Oriental rug, and as he floats down into the rug he passes through bejeweled mazes of color that appear exotic to him. This dream ended up casting a powerful influence on the artist's work, since much of Natkin's paintings are inspired by textiles. He’d not only explore the geometric and chromatic characteristics of European, Oriental or even Peruvian textiles, but also stamp fabrics directly onto the canvas to capture their textures in paint.
Robert Natkin
Gallery No. 455, 1963, Apollo Series
Acrylic on Canvas, 76 x 76 in.
Natkin started painting in 1948, when he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Two professors were particularly influential. Kathleen Blackshear encouraged students to widen their appreciation of non-European cultures, encouraging her students to visit the Field Museum to see the Peruvian textiles and other Indigenous art. Isobel Steele MacKinnon, on the other hand, favored the traditions of European fine art. Natkin embraced the ideas of both.
After leaving school in the early 1950s, he was briefly involved with a group of postwar artists based in Chicago nicknamed the “Monster Roster,” which included Neo-Expressionist painters such as Leon Golub. “The first artists that I was drawn to,” Natkin recalled, “were people like Edvard Munch, Rouault, Soutine, Kokoschka, people devouring their own hands.” When their work was shown in Chicago, he discovered de Kooning, Diebenkorn and Rothko, whose paintings particularly moved him.
The artist and his wife, painter Judith Dolnick, moved to New York in 1959. Fearing the disordered, insecure existence he’d known in childhood, Natkin kept his distance from other artists, particularly the Abstract Expressionists whose fabled self-destructive behavior unsettled him. For Natkin, art represented the means to psychological fulfillment and a secure middle-class life. So in 1960, he left the downtown art scene for Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He was painting almost compulsively, and within the year found himself part of the Young America show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1969 had a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The following year, Natkin and Dolnick moved to Redding, Connecticut, where he built a studio overlooking the countryside and over the ensuing forty years continued to experiment with color and form.
Since 1957, Natkin’s work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. He had solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, now known as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1969); The Art Institute of Chicago (1975); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1981); and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (1982). His work was featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1960), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1979 and 1980), and The Jewish Museum, New York (1982). During the 1970s he had five solo exhibitions at the esteemed André Emmerich Gallery, New York. In 1981, Harry N. Abrams published Robert Natkin, a lavishly illustrated 360-page monograph with text by noted British art critic Peter Fuller.
Robert Natkin’s work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
His impressive murals—one commissioned by Baxter Laboratories in Chicago (1975); another by the Millennium Hotel in New York City, where it hung in the lobby (1992–2025); and the best known, a 20-by-42 foot-work in the lobby of 1211 Avenue of the Americas at Rockefeller Center (1991–2024)—have been enjoyed by millions.