OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 2014, FROM 5 - 8PM

Sullivan Goss is pleased to announce a replete exhibition of floral oil paintings from the Estate of French­born American artist Leon Dabo, NA (1864­1960) that were painted between the early 1890s and 1954. Leon Dabo’s early involvement with flower painting was generally kept hidden from the world until a breakout exhibition of florals at the famous Knoedler & Co. in 1933 made news in a number of New York newspapers.

An iconic American painter of the Belle Époque, Leon Dabo built his reputation as one of Whistler’s greatest disciples with a body of Tonalist landscapes in the burgeoning New York art scene of the early twentieth century. Dabo’s reputation thus rested in his Tonalist images and in his role as an organizer of the famous Armory Show exhibition of 1913. While these floral oils were shown at such prestigious venues as Knoedler & Co. in New York, Galerie Zak in Paris, and the French Salon Nationale, they remain less well­known than other parts of his oeuvre. Nevertheless, Dabo’s unique language of decorative abstraction found a special resonance in both the exotic colors and the bravura brushwork of his florals. Incorporating Whistler’s wispiness, Odilon Redon’s visionary qualities, and his apparent taste for Japonisme and Chinoiserie, Dabo won international acclaim from the 1933 exhibition onwards for his cosmopolitan vision of nature’s most decorative form.