Balcomb Greene
Balcomb Greene | |
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Abstract expressionist and artist of New York Figurative Expressionism |
Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) was an American artist and teacher. He and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art and were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.[1][2][3] His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style.[4] From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end…. In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit."[5]
Balcomb Greene contributed to modernist cause through his writings: "It is actually the artist, and only he, who is equipped for approaching the individual directly. The abstract artist can approach man through the most immediate of aesthetic experiences, touching below consciousness and the veneer of attitudes, contacting the whole ego rather than the ego on the defensive."[6]
Biography
Balcomb (John Wesley) Greene was born on May 22, 1904, Millville, New York.
He studied from 1922 to 1926 at Syracuse University, where he received his BA degree. In 1927 he studied English literature at Columbia University. Greene taught English literature at Dartmouth College from 1928 to 1931. In 1931 he went to Paris and studied art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Soon after his return to New York in 1933, he realized that his true interest was painting. He started "to work for the Emily Francis Contemporary Gallery, a non-profit organization that showed particular interest in American artists and had exhibited the work of Bradley Walker Tomlin and Mark Tobey."[7] In 1935 he became the first president of the Artists Union and in 1936 the first chairman of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). In the late 1930s he was employed by the New York mural division of the Federal Art Project (WPA), and completed abstract murals for the Williamsburg Houses (Brooklyn Museum, on long-term loan from the New York City Housing Authority) and the Public Health Building of the 1939 New York World's Fair (destroyed). Also in 1939 and 1941 he was re-elected as chairman of American Abstract Artists, but resigned from that organization in 1942, when he began a career as a professor of art history and aesthetics.
After receiving his master's degree in art history (New York University, 1943), Greene taught at
Greene granted interviews to Jacqueline Moss, who was researching his wife for her master's thesis, published in 1980.[10][11]
Balcomb Greene died November 12, 1990, in
Selected solo exhibitions
His first solo shows were in Paris in 1937, and at J. B. Newmann's New Art Circle, in New York, in 1947. From 1950 to 1961 he exhibited annually at Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, where his 1950, 1955, and 1956 exhibitions were nominated by Art News as among the year's ten best. He exhibited at the
Balcomb Greene in 1976 was given the Altman First Prize in Figure Painting and the same year he became the member of the
Artworks in public collections
- Ball State University (formerly Teachers College), Muncie, Indiana;
- Baltimore, Maryland;
- Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn;
- Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh;
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland;
- The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago;
- Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;
- Guild Hall, East Hampton, New York;
- Wadsworth Atheneum. Hartford, Connecticut;
- Museum of Fine Arts, Houston;
- Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis;
- University of North Carolina;
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts;
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
- Museum of Modern Art, New York;
- Metropolitan Life Insurance;
- University of Miami, Miami, Florida;
- National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.;
- University of Nebraska;
- University of North Carolina;
- Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
- Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia;
- Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California;
- Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon;
- Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York;
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York;
- Parrish Museum, Southampton, New York;
- University of Texas;
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie;
- University of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia;
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
- Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
- Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
- Boca Museum of Art, Boca Raton, Florida.
See also
Notes
- ^ Gaines, Catherine S. (2011). "Balcomb and Gertrude Greene papers, circa 1880s-2009, bulk circa 1905-1990". Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
- S2CID 192090870.
- ISBN 9781884964213.
- ^ Biography of Balcombe Greene from Biography in askart.com
- ^ The Art of Balcomb Greene (New York: Horizon Press, ©1977.) p. 16-17
- ^ Balcomb Greene, "Expression as Production", American Abstract Artists: Three Yearbooks (1938, 1939, 1946) (reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 30.
- ^ The Art of Balcomb Greene (New York: Horizon Press, ©1977.) p. 12
- ^ Art News (September 1957). p.50
- ^ New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, Archived 2007-09-29 at the Wayback Machine p.32; p.37
- ^ Jacqueline Moss, "Gertrude Greene: Constructions of the 1930s and 1940s", Arts Magazine, Vol. 55, No. 8 (April 1981), p. 127
- ^ "Jacqueline Moss papers relating to painter Gertrude Greene, 1980-1981" Archives of American Art. Retrieved November 3, 2011
References
- Robert Beverly Hale and Niké Hale, The Art of Balcomb Greene (New York: Horizon Press, ©1977.)
- ART USA NOW Ed. by Lee Nordness; Vol.1, (The Viking Press, Inc., 1963.) pp. 138–141
External links
- Balcomb (John Wesley) Greene (1904 - 1990)-from AskArt.com
- Balcomb Greene paintings-from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
- American Abstract Artists