Image: Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York
Craig Starr Gallery will present Myron Stout’s black-and-white paintings and drawings alongside marble sculptures from Cycladic culture. The presentation is scheduled for Independent 20th Century from September 24 through 27, 2026.
The presentation includes eight Cycladic sculptures interspersed among three paintings and four drawings by Stout, with works dating from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Titled ‘Myron Stout & Cycladic Art,’ it is the second exhibition to explore Stout’s affinity for the Ancient Mediterranean in relation to his artistic practice.
Stout’s connection to Cycladic sculpture went beyond visual resemblance, rooted instead in a shared instinct toward reduction. Cycladic culture was a Bronze Age civilization that flourished among the islands of the southern Aegean from approximately 3,200 to 2,100 BCE.
Stout reworked his own small graphite drawings for years, sometimes over a decade, refining each until, in his words, it could say “as much as possible” with the least means necessary. His enduring interest in Greek mythology and philosophy was presented not as scholarship, but as a search for beginnings.
That instinct for paring things to their essentials took shape early in Stout’s training, when he spent months on a single drawing from the model, and later deepened after he settled in Provincetown in 1952.
