Van Doren Waxter will present Jack Tworkov’s major painting titled “Victim” at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023

December 8 – 10, 2023

Booth A30

Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive

As a founding member of the Abstract Expressionism movement in America, this painting titled “Victim” by Jack Tworkov is considered a signature work from this historic period and belongs to a trilogy of paintings which includes “The Father” (1954) and “Pink Mississippi (formerly titled “Son in Rebellion”)” (1954). Originally titled “Offering,” this painting highlights the trilogy’s thematic thread of the biblical tale of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac at Moriah. Tworkov’s flamelike gestural mark unifies these works.

While painting this work, which spanned seventeen months, Tworkov was consumed with “all ideas, ideologies, positions.” (Extreme, p. 78) Moreover, it was Tworkov’s philosophical struggle with the ego and his confession to “speak with one voice,” that presented the conflict to confront in this painting. “There is no room for freedom,” he wrote, “and the comfort of the soul too. To be free is to be cruel and savage, even towards those one loves. Freedom and Obedience are opposed to each other—even obedience to the inner promptings of the soul.” (Extreme, p. 83)

Born and raised as a Jew, Tworkov engaged more with tenants of enlightenment over the concerns of a daily religious practice. Mourning the death of his mother, who passed away in May 1956 and inspired two signature paintings in that year, Tworkov contemplated God as “the only symbol that validates life: The only opposition to despair, the only symbol that created love and responsibility to others.” (Extreme, p. 79) He would tell his sister, the painter Janice Biala, that “how strongly one feels about anything one discovers not in one’s conscious thinking, but in one’s painting.” (Extreme, p. 289)

It was under these conditions that Tworkov began this painting in October 1957, while on a visiting teaching stint at the University of Minnesota. Returning to New York, he declared the painting finished in December 1958 only to revise the work and re-title it from “Offering” to “Victim” in February 1959.

Perhaps a journal entry of February 2, 1959, in which Tworkov considers his use of a “central image” in his paintings, as the reasoning behind his decision to re-title the work—broadening the relationship from a single biblically inspired subject to a more generalized victim:

“The central image of these paintings [is] an action brought near by a telescope but out of earshot, silent and meaningless. In a thicket the actors might be lovers, or a murderer and his victim—the anxiety is that of silence of an action without sound, without meaning. When the spectator identifies himself as one of the actors he wakes up screaming and nothing is there.” (Extreme, p. 89).

Looking back on his work on the occasion of a lecture at Princeton in December 1959, and with specific attention to this painting, Tworkov realized how much his work was “based on linear energy becoming mass”:

“It is really what I have in common with so different a painter as Pollock. My origins though are in Cézanne who built up a mass through discrete patches of color. But the line is more like a voice.” (Extreme, p. 104)

When the painting made its debut in the solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in April 1959, it was presented with its original title “Offering".” Critic Herbert Crehan singled out the work in his review for Art News as Tworkov’s “most personal image.” And while the subject of the painting wasn’t quite right, the description is confirming:

“Sanguine reds and oranges conjure up a vision of a most bruised and prostate St. Sebastian, pierced and flayed, not yet inert, but caught in that final, despairing lunge of escape from the coup-de-grace.” (Crehan, Hurbert. "Reviews and Previews: Jack Tworkov at Stable Gallery." Art News 58: 2 (April 1959), p. 11)

This painting is considered one of the most important paintings of the period not only for embracing but also extending the notions of Abstract Expressionism.