Untitled (Primary Title)
Don Hazlitt, American, born 1948 (Artist)
Fifty Works for Fifty States: In 2008, in a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vogels distributed twenty-five hundred works across the country, giving fifty works to one art museum in each of the fifty states. This exhibition, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, showcases the fifty works VMFA received as part of that initiative, which bears the same title. As a diverse and rich body of work, the Vogels' generous giftattests to their passion and commitment to sharing contemporary art with the public.
Don Hazlitt Influenced by the opposite tendencies of the Chicago Imagist Jim Nutt and the Minimalist Richard Tuttle, Hazlitt prefers simple, humble materials such as cardboard combined with an almost cartoonlike use of bright colors and awkward forms. In the 1970s and '80s, he made both two- and three dimensional paintings. In Untitled of 1978, overlapping, roughly cut cardboard shapes suggest the red hillsand green forest of a strangely empty landscape. Yet the abstract quality of the forms resist a clear narrative. As one early reviewer noted, his three-dimensional works set up "little theaters of ambiguity." Likewise, his two-dimensional paintingsalso hover between abstraction and figuration, with the lines in Untitled of 1985 functioning as an abstract compositional element as well as suggesting the clapboard siding of a house.
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