Friday the Fourteenth, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 68 in. From the James Graham & Sons press release: "The painter Kimber Smith (American 1922-1981) was a prominent member of the group of American painters and poets who later became known as the second generation Abstract Expressionists and the New York School. As with many of this generation, for instance Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe or Sam Francis, Smith's mature style began developing during his formative years in Paris. Smith was ahead of his time in his ability to consider the whole canvas with every brushstroke and his early use of large simple geometric shapes. These tendencies align him more with Color Field painters such as Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, save one distinguishing characteristic. Smith kept a hands-on approach closer to Expressionism, using a variety of increasingly washy primary colored passages married to notational jottings with paint tubes or crayons. Seemingly reductive, like the late...