Finding 54: Lawrence Alloway installing Systemic Painting, 1966

March 17, 2011

The photograph featured here documents the installation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's influential 1966 exhibition, Systemic Painting. Curator Lawrence Alloway stands to the right overseeing the hanging of Neil Williams's Sartorial Habits of Billy Bo (1966) in the High Gallery. To the right of Williams's painting, Frank Stella's Wolfeboro IV (1966) leans up against the wall waiting to be hung. In addition to Williams and Stella, the exhibition included painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Ryman.

In the exhibition's catalogue, Alloway explained his use of the term "systemic" by commenting that in these works, "the end-state of the painting is known prior to completion (unlike the theory of Abstract Expressionism). This does not exclude empirical modifications of a work in progress, but it does focus them within a system. A system is a unified whole, the parts of which demonstrate some regularities."

–Amanda Brown, Archives Assistant