Wood Gaylor, Quietly Dazzling, Helped an Art World Invent Itself
Two shows introduce a forgotten innovator who fused modernism, folk art and documentary to portray his beloved New York scene.
Wood Gaylor made gregarious portrayals of New York artists of the Penguin group. In “Posters” (1920), he showed them collaborating on enormous painted posters for a Red Cross bond drive in 1918.Credit...Samuel Gaylor and The Heckscher Museum of Art
Jan. 21, 2021
HUNTINGTON, N.Y. — In the early decades of the 20th-century, things happened in the New York art world when painters like Walt Kuhn, Florine Stettheimer and Wood Gaylor took matters into their own hands. They established clubs and professional organizations and mounted exhibitions — including the 1913 Armory Show, which jump-started American modernism with heady exposure to the European kind.