A Slice of Augustus Vincent Tack

Augustus Vincent Tack, Untitled Oval (Golden Morning), 1930, oil on canvas on board, 69 x 43 in., the Phillips Collection I’ve been a fan of Augustus Vincent Hack’s landscape-based abstract paintings from the 1930s ever since I saw them at the Phillips Collection. To be frank, it’s hard to see them anywhere else. Duncan Phillips was a close friend and longtime supporter of Tack’s work, which, in the 1930s, looked like it could be as important to the American abstract avant-garde as anyone. It mostly was not, but the paintings are still nice, and sometimes a little strange. detail of Tack’s Evening, 1934-36, as it was exhibited at the Phillips in 2014 The first time I noticed the strangeness apart from the niceness was in 2014, when I realized that Tack had painted a trompe l’oeil frame around an abstracted view of the sky, essentially a representational painting of an abstract painting. While his extremely conventional, even boring, portraits have sold at auction for nearly nothing,…