William Baziotes was an American painter known for his luminous abstractions of biomorphic forms. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Baziotes’s work remained outside the dominant aspects of the movement. His paintings are in many ways more closely aligned with the early Surrealist works of Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell. “It is the mysterious that I love in painting,” he once reflected. “It is the stillness and the silence. I want my pictures to take effect very slowly, to obsess and to haunt.” Born on June 11, 1912 in Pittsburgh, PA, he was raised in the town of Reading, PA, where he worked antiquing glass as a young man. Interested in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the...