Easilee

PETER BRADLEY (B. 1940)

Easilee

signed, titled, and dated 'Easilee Peter Bradley 2020' (on the reverse)

acrylic on canvas

14 x 22 inches (35.6 x 55.9 cm)

Painted in 2020.

PROVENANCE:

Private collection, New York

NOTES:

Born in 1940 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, Peter Bradley studied at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit and later at the Yale School of Art. His early life was steeped in music as his adoptive mother’s boarding house hosted traveling jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, whose rhythms and improvisations would leave an indelible imprint on his painterly sensibility. After moving to New York in the 1960s, Bradley worked at the Guggenheim Museum and Perls Gallery, where he became associate director. He later met André Emmerich Gallery, who presented Bradley’s first solo exhibition in 1972. A pioneering figure of postwar abstraction, Bradley is closely associated with the Color Field painting movement, though his practice has always resisted easy categorization. His work is represented in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Menil Collection, Houston.

Bradley’s art is deeply rooted in the interplay between music, movement, and color, which is a dialogue that he has refined over more than six decades. A believer in the autonomy of color, he approaches painting as a form of visual improvisation, using acrylics to orchestrate spontaneous harmonies of hue and texture. His technique, often involving poured or sprayed pigment, translates the structure of music, often jazz, into abstraction, with rhythm and chance working in tandem. This sensibility was already visible in his groundbreaking role as curator of The De Luxe Show (1971), the first racially integrated exhibition in the United States, where he championed formal innovation over identity-based categorization. In both his curatorial and painterly work, Bradley has believed in color as a universal language capable of transcending social and historical boundaries.

Easilee (2020) captures the lyrical immediacy and emotional resonance that define Bradley’s late practice. Against a fluid ground that transitions from yellow to turquoise and deep blue, the artist layers splashes of green, white, and brown in gestural sweeps that evoke both the cadence of music and the spontaneity of motion. Though intimate in scale, the composition radiates an expansive energy with its transparency and overlapping tones suggesting a choreography of sound translated into light. The surface feels alive, as if animated by rhythm itself. In this small yet powerful work, one can sense Bradley’s enduring pursuit of color as a way to render the intangibility of sound, feeling and time.