Clara Diament Sujo was guided by a visionary eye. Over her nearly 60-year career as a critic, curator, collector, and gallerist, she defined a global approach to understanding contemporary art. Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets, while bringing leading figures from the United States and Europe into dialogue with artists in South America and the Caribbean. She set out on this path as one of the few pioneering female gallerists in the 1960s, emerging contemporaneously with notable peers like Denise René and Ileanna Sonnabend in France or Eleanor Ward and Martha Jackson in the United States. Her network driven, organic approach to writing and exhibition programing propelled Sujo beyond stylistic categories and national borders. Without such constraints, she crafted a critical and curatorial style across both of her galleries, Galería Estudio Actual, Caracas (1968–1983) and CDS Gallery, New York (1981–2013). Over their combined 45 years of public activities, both galleries cultivated dynamic programing around emergent and established artists from across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. For information on the Galleries’ histories and activities please click HERE.
Thinking in hemispheric, as well as transatlantic terms, she forged a place for Latin American art in the North American and European markets...
Sujo’s transnational understanding of art grew out of the formative experiences of her early life. She was born in 1921 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A daughter of Jewish immigrants, her father ran a successful export fur business. The collections she encountered in the homes of her father’s business associates sparked an initial interest in art. These early encounters flourished when Sujo moved to Chicago in 1943 to take a secretarial position with Abbott Laboratories. While in the city she regularly frequented the Art Institute of Chicago. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Katharine Kuh, a vanguard gallerist in the city who eventually became the AIC’s first curator of modern painting and sculpture. The three years that Sujo lived and worked in the United States solidified a passion for the arts that would carry through the rest of her life.
Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1946, she attended art history courses taught by the renowned intellectual and critic, Jorge Romero Brest. He was then lecturing at the Fray Mocho bookstore—an informal location necessitated after his forced dismissal from the faculty of the Universidad de La Plata by the Juan Domingo Perón government. Romero Brest staunchly advocated for a turn away from regionalism in contemporary Latin American art in favor of an integration of European modernist theories that tended toward abstraction. His teachings on art left a lasting imprint on Sujo’s own aesthetics.
- Devon Zimmerman, PhD
Originally known as Estudio Actual, CDS Gallery opened it’s doors on East 79th St., New York in 1981 and for more than three decades, showcased recognized masters of Modern and Contemporary Art from the United States, Latin America, Europe and Australia. Since its inaugural show, Masters of the Americas, featuring North American artists such as Rothko, Pollock, and Motherwell alongside Latin American artists including Rivera, Lam, and Matta, CDS has played an integral part in the understanding of the art of the Americas as a cohesive and important area of contemporary art.
To learn more about CDS Gallery, click here.
I am an artist, therefore I am a miracle. An artist sees things and hears things that others don't see and hear. To be an artist is not a career. It is a way of life. I have been an artist since I was a small boy.
Adja Yunkers
Adja Yunkers 1900–1983
Born Adolf Junkers in Latvia, Adja Yunkers’ journey to becoming an artist began when he left home at 14 to study art in Saint Petersburg. In 1919, after serving in the Russian military for two years, he moved to Germany and had his first show at the Maria Kunde Galerie in Hamburg in 1921. While in Germany he became familiar with artists in the Sturmgruppe and he also participated in a Russian avant-garde exhibition alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Archipenko, and Marc Chagall.
Yunkers began a series of travels in 1923, from Spain to the Canary Islands to Paris and finally to Cuba in 1926 (where he changed his name from Adolf Junkers to Adja Yunkers). He returned to Europe by the end of 1927 and remained active in both artistic and political movements, even moving to Spain in 1936 to fight in their civil war. He immigrated to Sweden in 1939 and remained there for many years, becoming associated with Swedish Surrealists and publishing three journals about art and politics. These handcrafted publications led Yunkers to develop a deeper interest in printmaking and, in the 1940s, he made many woodblock prints that exhibited the influence of German Expressionism on his work.
In 1947, Yunkers moved to New York to teach at the New School for Social Research. Several years later, in 1952, he married a former student, Dore Ashton, who became an art critic for The New York Times. It was through Ashton that Yunkers was introduced to Abstract Expressionist artists. This association had an enormous effect on the development of his later paintings and collages, which became more minimal and monochromatic with an emphasis on negative space. Printmaking and bookmaking would also remain important to him throughout his career; in 1949, he founded the Rio Grande Workshop in New Mexico and, beginning in 1969, he illustrated several limited-edition books by the poet Octavio Paz.
Yunkers exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe, and his works can be found in numerous important public institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the British Museum, London, and the Jewish Museum, New York.
Auction Results Adja Yunkers
_1701121745_1701359381.png)
