Ben Wilson, Ozymandias, 1989

Ben Wilson

Ozymandias, 1989

Oil on masonite board

Boldly signed by Ben Wilson on the back

36 × 48 inches
Unframed

This work is titled "Ozymandias" after the famous sonnet written by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It is one of the most poignant meditations on the fleeting nature of human power and the inevitability of decline. The poem serves as a reminder that time erodes even the most imposing empires and leaders and that the pursuit of lasting fame and control is ultimately futile. (Ozymandias is the Greek name for the pharaoh Ramesses II (r. 1279–1213 BC), derived from a part of his throne name, Usermaatre. In 1817, Shelley began writing the poem "Ozymandias", after the British Museum acquired the Younger Memnon, a head-and-torso fragment of a statue of Ramesses II, which dated from the 13th century BC. )
Depending on how one views Ben Wilson's Abstract Expressionist painting "Ozymandias" -- the imagery might reveal the head of an angry king and a sickle.
Shelley's poem Ozymandias reads:
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ben Wilson was one of the youngest artists to be given a show at prestigious ACA Gallery in 1940.
In 2017, he was the subject of a career retrospective at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University from September 6 to November 4 and it was accompanied by a catalogue.

Measurements:
36" x 48"

About Ben Wilson:
Ben Wilson was born in Philadelphia in 1913 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Kiev and settled in New York City. He was educated in Manhattan public schools and graduated from City College in 1935. To gain exposure to a wider range of styles, he also studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Educational Alliance.

Admired by critics throughout his long career, Wilson was singled out as a “discovery” by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewel even before his first one-man show at the Galerie Neuf in 1946. His paintings of the ’30s and ’40s were expressionistically rendered, often Biblical parables, filled with what he called “the grief of the intolerable” and reflecting an acute awareness of the agony of the time, from the Holocaust to the Spanish Civil War. A WPA artist who identified strongly with the plight of the Jews in Europe, he relentlessly explored themes of war, torment, and futility in his early decades of painting.

When times changed and social pressures subsided, Wilson’s mood lifted. He spent 1952-54 in Paris working at the Academie Julien. During the ’50s his involvement with specific imagery persisted but became more psychological and mythic in orientation. Influenced by Cubism, he created a vocabulary of interlocking shapes and bold, sweeping gestures that served as a transition between his early figurative expressionism and his later abstract constructivist concerns. Towards the end of the decade Wilson reached a crossroads, moving towards abstraction and searching for what he called “a scaffolding under the externals.”

By 1960, influenced by the Russian Constructivists, Mondrian, and Abstract Expressionism, Wilson turned to abstraction. Reexamining the basic elements of painting, he evolved his own personal vocabulary and structure, fusing the cerebral and the emotive. He became increasingly experimental, using house paint, sand, and other unorthodox materials in paintings that he worked from all directions, dripping, spraying, stenciling, and collaging. He employed elements of disjunction, repetitions of geometric motifs, linear networks, and complex overlays to create the transparent, multi-layer development of space that characterizes his later paintings. A consummate draftsman, Wilson filled notebook after notebook with drawings that he amplified in his paintings.

Eschewing popular movements, Wilson was always one to pursue a personal aesthetic. Despite more than 30 one-man shows and 50 years of teaching, he increasingly withdrew from the gallery scene but continued to paint daily until his death at age 88 in 2001 in Blairstown, New Jersey, where he and his sculptor wife Evelyn Wilson lived and worked in their rustic Revolutionary War-era stone house and studio.