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At the Parrish Art Museum, Tony Bechara’s 60-Year Career Gets Its First Full Reckoning

In conversation with Observer, executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut discusses her friendship with the artist, the dinner parties that made him a fixture of the East End and what made his hand-labored grids so moving.

“Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds” opened a few weeks ago at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. The exhibition marks the first retrospective to span the full arc of the Puerto Rican painter’s 60-year career, from his 1970 Blinds series through works made in the final year of his life. Bechara passed away this past April on his 83rd birthday, and was best known for his shimmering grids of hand-painted quarter-inch squares and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, where he served as board chair for 18 years. The show, on view through November 1, was co-organized by Parrish executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and associate curator Kaitlin Halloran, and arrives as part of the museum’s programming around the country’s semiquincentennial. We caught up with Ramírez-Montagut to hear about her friendship with the artist, and the dinner parties that made him a fixture of the East End.

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Bechara gave the Parrish 19 Reds (2015) not long before his death last April. How did that gift come about?

Tony had already participated in the Parrish’s 2023 exhibition celebrating our 125th anniversary, for which we invited artists with deep ties to the East End, artists like Tony, who spent many of his summers in the Hamptons, to select works from the museum’s collection and place them in dialogue with their own.

Tony thoroughly enjoyed researching our collection and spending time in the vault. During our conversations, I casually remarked that it was a shame he was not represented in the Parrish’s permanent collection and suggested that he consider gifting us a painting so that his work would be represented in perpetuity alongside the artists who have shaped this region. Being that those artists include William Merritt Chase, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Malcolm Morley and many artists that he admired, he was tempted!

"Tony Bechara: An Artist of Many Worlds" Artists: Tony Bechara Venue: Parrish Art Museum Address: 279 Montauk Hwy, Water Mill, NY 11976 Through: November 1, 2026

Tony loved the Parrish and was genuinely excited about the direction of the museum during my tenure, so he had many reasons to make such a gift. He invited me to his studio to choose a painting, and I selected a large, vibrant, luminous and scintillating work that immediately captivated me. In fact, I hung it in my office for some time before........

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