William Baziotes: Joseph Helman Gallery. (New York).(Brief Article)

At the start of his career, around 1932-33, William Baziotes made a drawing that, in light of the gentle, haunting, lyrical works for which he later became known, one would never associate with him: a rather expressionistic flagellation scene. A mean old woman is whipping a pretty young girl, who seems to be enjoying it.

The two figures are locked together in a single right curve like a boomerang. What's most striking about the image, as this survey of works on paper from 1930-62 makes clear, is that the form is the ancestor of all those delicious, meandering curves and bends we see ...

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