Draft:Wallace Bradstreet Putnam

Wallace Bradstreet Putnam (1899-1989) was an artist who first came to the attend of the New York art world in 1936 with a large assemblage provocatively entitled Agog, which was prominently displayed in the entrance to "Fantastic Art Dada and Surrealism," an important and celebrate exhibition organized by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although it was assumed that Putnam had created an anti-art gesture, causing some critics to label him a Dadaist, he was actually a dedicated and highly innovative painter who went on to create a large body of paintings--the human figure, birds, animals, landscapes--touched with element of abstraction that serve to distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries.

In his lifetime, Wallace Putnam's paintings were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York at Purchase, and by some of New York's leading art dealers, among them Betty Parsons and Lerner-Heller. His paintings are included in many important private collections, as well as in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. The first major monograph of his work by Francis M. Naumann was published by Harry N. Abrams in 2002.