SANTA BARBARA, CA – Sullivan Goss is proud to announce the publication of a new hardbound catalog, The Pastels of Leon Dabo.  With contributions by one of our nation’s most eminent scholars in American art history, Dr. William Gerdts, as well as by Dr. Cody Hartley of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and gallerists Frank Goss and Nathan Vonk, The Pastels of Leon Dabo should greatly enliven and enrich the growing conversation about the life and work of the French-born, American artist who helped to organize the famous 1913 Armory Show. 

This beautiful new book presents fresh research from primary source materials at the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Estate of the Artist. New scholarship solved such prosaic mysteries as the year of the artist’s birth (1864 – it was thought to be 1868 during his lifetime), but it also revealed one of the artist’s secret long-held passions - the creation of vividly colored, beautifully abstracted floral pastels - two dozen of which are published in color for the first time in this book.  Reassembling images that have gone through the inventories of Christies, Hirschl & Adler in New York, D. Wigmore in New York, and Stillwell House Fine Art & Antiques in New Jersey and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and various private collections, the book offers a chance to examine the work of an artist who was instrumental in promoting both pastel as a medium and the most modern visions of the day.  As the founding chairman of an exhibition group called The Pastellists, Dabo positioned himself and his colleagues from The Eight and various other Impressionists and Tonalists as the young lions of the early twentieth century. 

Written up today (July 20, p. C22) in the New York Times, the discovery of Estate of National Academician Leon Dabo (1864-1960) has allowed the gallery to publish this new book as well as an earlier hardbound book, The Drawings of Leon Dabo and to help organize a museum exhibition at the Grand Valley State University in Michigan.  Other institutions have expressed interest in mounting exhibitions for the artist, but the gallery is not yet ready to make any further announcements. 

The gallery hopes that this book will reintroduce a new generation of curators and collectors to Dabo’s Tonalist, Symbolist, Aesthetic Movement, and Post-Impressionist artwork.  The book will be offered for sale at $39.95 through the gallery and will be available for purchase by August 8, 2012.  Presales may be arranged. 

This book was published in connection with an exhibition at Sullivan Goss entitled LEON DABO: Toutes Les Fleurs that will run from August 2 – October 28, 2012.

Please contact Diana with any questions or comments about the book.

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Email: diana@sullivangoss.com