Walter Darby Bannard (September 23, 1934 – October 2, 2016) was an American abstract painter and professor of art and art history at the University of Miami.

Biography

Bannard was born in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he graduated in 1952. He attended Princeton University, where he befriended Frank Stella and Michael Fried, who were also interested in minimalist abstraction. Clement Greenberg included Bannard in the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964. Bannard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968. He also served as co-chair of the International Exhibitions Committee of the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1989 to 1992, Bannard chaired the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he taught painting until his death in 2016.

Work

Art

Bannard was associated with modernism, lyrical abstraction, minimalism, formalism, abstraction and color field painting. His art has been exhibited in nearly a hundred solo exhibitions and several hundred group exhibitions. Bannard's paintings from 1959 to 1965 contained few forms, as little as a single band painted around a field of color, and then developed into somewhat more complex geometric forms by the mid-1960s. The critic Phyllis Tuchman wrote about a 2015 exhibition of these works at Berry Campbell Gallery, "These colors are still radiant. And the artist’s pale palette is as uniquely personal today as it was fifty years ago. You can’t even apply a name to his hues." In the late 1960s the forms dissolved into pale, atmospheric fields of color applied with rollers and paint-soaked rags. He began using the new acrylic mediums in 1970 and his paintings evolved into colorful expanses of richly colored gels and polymers applied with squeegees and commercial floor brooms.

Writings

Bannard wrote over a hundred reviews and essays which appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and many other publications. He curated and wrote the catalog for the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Hans Hofmann at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art, a collection of his thoughts edited by Franklin Einspruch, was published in 2022.

Selected museum collections