American Modernist Mell Daniel (1899-1975) was one one of several early American avant-garde painters who resurfaced in the 1970s after a several decade absence from the art world. In 1970, painter Elaine de Kooning rediscovered his work, which subsequently led to successful late-in-life exhibitions at New York’s Fischbach Gallery.

Born in Griffin, GA, Daniel came to Brooklyn in 1911 and soon obtained a job in the art department of The New York Tribune. Two years later he enrolled in evening classes at the Independent School of Art. Daniel’s first solo exhibition was held at Marius de Zayas’s famed Modern Gallery in 1917 when the artist was only 18 and consumed largely painting trees, or as the artist puts it, “these drawings…seek to explain the idea of a forest instead of a single tree.” From 1917 through 1925, Daniel exhibited with the Society of Independent Artists. Still Life, an entry in the 1921 exhibition, showed the influence of Cézanne and cubism. In 1933 the artist retired from the art world and became associated with the Interchemical Corporation, becoming president of its standard productions department. Although he would continue to draw and paint for his own pleasure, it was not until December 1970, after Elaine de Kooning’s rediscovery of his work, that he would have his second important solo show.

According to poet John Ashbery, Daniel utilized a signature medium of ‘watercolor, grease-crayon and inks to paint schemas that began as hieratized patterns of intertwining branches…but have since become more severely patterned accumulations of concentric octagons or lattice-like slats, or imaginary landscapes of cubes or diamonds.” Daniel worked laboriously on each drawing and was notoriously reclusive, even keeping his own wife from seeing works until completion. Ashbery writes that Daniel’s works were “not abstractions but realistic renderings of abstract states and feelings.” He continues, “the paintings bespeak of happiness, warmth and intimacy, paradoxically existing  in a world of anti-human, or at least a-human order.”

Daniel settled with his wife Minna Lederman Daniel, longtime editor and founder of Modern Music Quarterly, in Tomkins Cove, NY. They were close friends with many art world contemporaries, including Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who were collectors of his work.