Tony Bechara’s Grid Paintings Finally Receive a Museum Survey
At the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, a long-overdue institutional portrait of Tony Bechara is taking shape through 84 works that span more than 60 years. “Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds” is the first museum survey devoted to the Puerto Rican-born painter, who died last year, and it places his disciplined abstractions alongside the civic life that made him such a force in New York cultural circles.
Born in San Juan in 1942, Bechara studied philosophy, international relations, and law before becoming a full-time painter. The exhibition begins with a muted landscape from 1968, but quickly moves into the grid-based language for which he became known: masking tape laid down in exacting patterns, then thousands of quarter-inch squares painted by hand until the surface resolves into luminous, almost pixel-like fields. The method was rigorous, but never mechanical. As Parrish director Monica Ramírez-Montagut noted, Bechara worked with strategy while leaving room for improvisation and surprise.
That tension between order and openness runs through the show. Works such as “20 Magentas,” “20 Yellows,” and “20 Cobalts” demonstrate how he could build entire compositions from a single color family, while still allowing the eye to register shifts, interruptions, and small deviations. The result is a body of work that feels both controlled and alive.
Bechara’s public role was equally distinctive. He served as board chairman of El Museo del Barrio and also sat on the boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Studio in a School. He supported the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was widely regarded as a trusted cultural leader in Latino New York. Friends and colleagues say he was also notably reluctant to use those connections to advance his own career.
Instead, he used his influence to help others, including the Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera. That combination of artistic rigor, institutional leadership, and quiet advocacy gives the Parrish exhibition its emotional center. It is not only a survey of a singular painter’s method, but also a reminder of how deeply one artist can shape the cultural life around him.
