Franklin Einspruch remembers painter Walter Darby Bannard (1934 – 2016) and considers Bannard’s recent paintings as the culmination of a lifelong exploration of abstraction: “Modernism isn’t a style, [Bannard] insisted, it’s a working attitude oriented toward visual excellence. ‘Modernism is aspiring, authoritarian, hierarchical, self-critical, exclusive, vertically structured, and aims for the best,’ he wrote in 1984. But the aspiration has a terminus, as he clarified in his aphorisms: ‘Great art is immutable, placid, complete, unchanging, and content to let life rush around it in its perpetual race.’ That exquisite union of journey and goal is preserved in his paintings, each which stares right back at the viewer as if it were another person, having the last word.”

Bannard’s recent paintings are on view at Berry Campbell Gallery, New York through November 12, 2016.