Grid Painter and Art Patron Dies at 83

Tony Bechara, an artist who was beloved in New York for his intricately crafted grid paintings and for his patronage of El Museo del Barrio, died on Wednesday on his 83rd birthday. His death was confirmed by El Museo del Barrio, which did not state a cause.

Since the 1970s, Bechara repeatedly painted multihued grids using a method that was as rigorous as the concept behind it. His mind-bending, eye-popping canvases sought to understand abstract notions such as randomness and controlled chaos, and though perhaps less famous than other experiments in the medium by his New York colleagues, these works have since emerged as some of the most cutting-edge painterly experiments done in an era when painting was commonly pronounced dead.

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But Bechara’s contributions to the city’s art scene extend far beyond what can be shown in galleries and museums. For 18 years, he was board chair at El Museo del Barrio, a museum that specializes in Caribbean and Latin American art, and he was also a trustee at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Rail.

He also was instrumental in stoking greater interest in the work of the painter Carmen Herrera, one of his friends, prior to her death in 2022. When Herrera received a Whitney Museum survey in 2016, Bechara was among those thanked in the credits for it.

Bechara considered his patronage of arts institutions and his promotion of other artists a part of his practice all the same. Of those activities, he told AzureAzure, “They are an extension of my commitment to art, like unfinished murals in which I work during the night.”

By day, he worked on his paintings, which he made via a process that involved repeatedly taping and un-taping his canvases, then filling in various areas with brightly colored acrylic. Thousands of quarter-inch squares result, nestled together to form vast grids.

Speaking to his friend, Brooklyn Rail editor Phong Bui, he once described his process this way: “It begins with taping one layer on the whole canvas vertically, then proceeds the same horizontally. The next thing is to apply the selected color with a small brush, then remove the tape. Repeat this same process on the unpainted squares one more time vertically, then horizontally, then apply the last layer of colors. What I love is the degrees of surprise every time; to take each layer of tape off the canvas is to reveal new worlds of optical symphony.”

This symphonic aesthetic differentiated Bechara’s work from contemporaneous Minimalist experiments made during the 1970s. Whereas those works were cold and unfeeling, Bechara’s art is overflowing with color. It also slyly finds ways of exceeding its rigid structure, with some squares slightly exceeding their frame and others flowing onto the sides of his canvases. Critic John Yau recently noted that Bechara’s process “undermines any sense of stability that we associate with a grid.”

To contemporary eyes, these paintings look like computer screens, with each square acting as something like a pixel. But Bechara started producing the grid paintings during the early 1970s, at a time when they would not have had that connotation. At the time, he instead believed his paintings would help him understand the nature of perception.

“Since I have the grid as a structure,” he told Bui, “I trust each painting to tell me what to do, how to be more random, or less random. It is always the surprise element that I find alluring.”

Tony Bechara in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1942. His mother hailed from Majorca, Spain; his father, from Beirut. Bechara attended school in San Juan, then was sent by his parents to prep school at the New York Military Academy. At his parents’ urging, he studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, then re-enrolled as a graduate student. His parents “didn’t believe I could make a living being an artist,” he told the Brooklyn Rail, noting that they really wanted him to become a lawyer.

Bechara successfully persuaded his parents to then let him spend two years studying history at the Sorbonne in Paris, then to let him travel across Western Europe. He returned to New York, attending NYU’s international relations graduate program.

Then he started drifting toward art, initially creating figurative paintings in his spare time. Ultimately, in 1967, he enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where his professors included painters such as Robert Mangold and Malcolm Morley, as well as the art historian Lucy Lippard. Inspired by Italian Neorealist movies, he started to paint black-and-white figurative imagery, and he even thought briefly of becoming a filmmaker himself.

He grew interested in opticality, and his focus sharpened towards sights seen and works experienced: paintings by Titian and Tintoretto viewed in Italy; Post-Impressionist works by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac encountered in France, along with the color theories of M. E. Chevreul that inspired them; mosaics and calligraphy seen at the Alhambra in Spain. He was thus on his way to painting his grids.

Those grid paintings began showing up in some prominent places. Bechara appeared in the 1975 Whitney Biennial. Then, a decade later, he was given a solo show at El Museo del Barrio.

Bechara became chair of El Museo del Barrio in 1996 and helped steer the museum through a period when it faced criticism. Some in the surrounding neighborhood claimed that, in expanding its purview to focus increasingly on Latin America, the institution had stopped caring as much about Puerto Rican art, its initial area of focus. Bechara dismissed those claims, telling the New York Times, “If the criticism is that we’re not an ethnocentric gallery, then that’s fair. But our ambition and our mission demand that we become a world-class museum, open to all people.”

He weathered a different kind of controversy in 2013, when Margarita Aguilar filed a complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights, claiming that she had faced discrimination when she was let go as El Museo del Barrio’s director. In her initial lawsuit, Aguilar claimed Bechara had said she and another staff member were “acting like hysterical women” when Aguilar tried to fire an employee. Bechara denied this, and the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.

Although he left his post in 2016, Bechara remained a key figure for the museum, donating $1 million in 2019 in support of its curatorial and education departments.

“I had the honor of working my entire tenure with him at El Museo del Barrio and could have not dreamed of a better and more caring Chair than Tony,” Julián Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Barrio from 2002 to 2010, told ARTnews in an email. “He was both visionary having the greatest aspirations for El Museo. He was always encouraging and allowing for risk taking when needed, yet careful in planning and patient when essential.”

“Tony’s passing is an extraordinary loss for El Museo del Barrio and for the entire arts community,” Patrick Charpenel, El Museo del Barrio’s current director, said in a statement. “He was a force of nature. His vision and leadership helped pave the way for what El Museo is today, and his legacy will continue to inspire generations to come.”

In recent years, an unprecedented level of attention was paid to his art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired its first Bechara painting in 2023. The next year, he joined the roster of Lisson Gallery.

All the while, he continued painting. Asked about his late-career work in 2015 by AzureAzure, he said, “As I create my work, I am obsessively driven to the search for the divine accident … what we call a Eureka moment … that unknown path that, as poetry or song says, is only found as you walk through it.”