Most of the artworks in Stratton House Inn are by the internationally known artist, Arthur Secunda.

"Brilliant color and vital optimism
emanate from Secunda's collages and prints.
The line in Secunda's work filters through the
cracks in the tears or accumulations of color,
giving the work vibration and movement.
Often the line seems to be outside the work,
either in the artist's eye or behind what is evoked."

-- Nissa Torrents, University College, London
From a monograph prepared for an exhibition
by Kenneth Noland, Jim Bird, and Arturo Secunda
at Galleria Joan Prats in Barcelona, Spain.

Arthur Secunda: Brief Biography

Arthur Secunda (aka Arturo Secunda outside the United States) was born in New Jersey in 1927. His career in art has been marked by international recognition in many fields - painter, sculptor, teacher, critic and printmaker. In 1947, after a year in the U.S. Air Force as a staff artist, he attended New York University and the Art Students League in New York where he studied with Harry Sternberg, Reginald Marsh and Julian Levi. He later continued his education in Paris and Rome where he studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine and painting with Andre L'hote. Secunda spent the following year in Mexico working at the Esmeralda Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, where he learned the art of woodcarving and woodcut printing.

Throughout his dynamic career Secunda has cultivated his art connoisseurship via many interesting jobs which have included museum curator of education at the Santa Barbara Art Museum, university instructor and lecturer at UCLA, the Pasadena Art Museum, Otis Art Institute and the Palm Springs Desert Museum. In addition he produced a weekly TV program entitled "Arts of All Times," and was the founding editor of Artforum magazine in Los Angeles in 1963.

Secunda's first one man show was at the Galerie Lucien Gout in Montpellier in 1950. Since that time, he has exhibited widely all over the United States, Europe and Japan in over 150 galleries, museums and universities, as well as major art fairs in New York, Paris, Basel and Cologne.

His art works hang in the permanent collections of important institutions worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.; the Chicago Art Institute; the Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts and the Detroit Art Institute in the U.S. In addition to the Tel Aviv Museum, his art has been acquired by European museums in Aries, Geneva, Stockholm, Choler, Ostend, Brussels, Zurich, and elsewhere.

Secunda is particularly noted for his brilliant collages and striking graphics. J.M. Rouquette, Director of the Arles Museum Reattu has said, "Secunda's collages make use of a very seductive, original and somewhat mysterious technique in which the actual tearing of paper coincides with a personal philosophy of color." His graphics have been acclaimed for their lush color and technical inventiveness and his innovations in printmaking have inspired two grants from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. For many years, Secunda has maintained studios in New York, Paris, and Beverly Hills; and currently maintains one in Arizona. He travels and exhibits extensively and currently is living with his artist wife and son, Alexandre, in Arizona.

For additional background on the life and work of Arthur Secunda, please see Commentary and Reviews.

"In Secunda's work there is a sensation
of greatness and profound thought.
His art is that of a man who has had 'love affairs'
with nature for a long time.
When he represents the sea, mountains, beaches, a sky,
there is no stopping place, no limit;
horizons flee, plunging through space.
His style is as large as nature herself.
One feels that this artist has an extremely keen eye
for the hidden beauty which in our hectic world
most people disregard. His collage technique is unique:
it shows not a renewed subjectivity,
but quite a new objectivity - the result of what
I would like to call a global art consciousness."

-- Frank E Edebau
Oostende, Belgium

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