Thornton Willis

Thornton Willis (born May 25, 1936) is an American abstract painter. He has contributed to the

Biography

Thornton Willis's father, Willard Willis, was an evangelical preacher in the Church of Christ. Willis spent formative years in Montgomery Alabama, returning to graduate from Tate High School in Pensacola, Florida. After three years in the United States Marine Corps, Thornton Willis studied, under the G.I. Bill, at Auburn University for one year transferring to the

In 1967 Thornton Willis accepted a teaching position at Wagner College in Staten Island, and moved to New York City. He established his first studio in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. In 1968, he had his first one-person show at the Henri Gallery in Washington, DC. In New York, Willis met fellow painters, Dan Christensen, Jules Olitski, Ken Showell as well as sculptors and installation artists Richard Serra, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark, all working out of a process art orientation.

The Slat Paintings

From 1967 to 1973, Thornton Willis worked on a series of paintings now called his “Slat Series” involving a “wet on wet” process working on the floor on large wet unstretched

From 1971 to 1972, Willis taught painting at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He had a one-person show of his “Slat” paintings at the Simonne Stern Gallery, New Orleans in 1970, and at The New Orleans Museum of Fine Art (then The Delgado Museum,) in 1971 which also owns a large slat painting. He continued to show with Simonne Stern through 1974.

The Wedge Paintings

After returning to New York City, Willis began his formalist compositions exploring Form and Field ambiguity that led to his “Wedge” series, 1974-1982.

In 1979, Thornton Willis exhibited his “Wedge” Paintings at the 55 Mercer Street Gallery where the work attracted the attention of British collectors, Robin Symes, and Charles and Doris Saatchi. He showed the “Wedge” paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery, NYC, in 1980 is an exhibition entitled “Seven Young Americans” curated by Sam Hunter which included friend and fellow artist Sean Scully.^[7] In 1980 he had a one-person show at the Oscarsson Hood Gallery who would represent the artist until 1986. In 1980 he met the European dealer, Claes Nordenhake, and exhibited his “Wedge” paintings in Malmo, Sweden, Gothenburg, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland and Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1982, Willis began a series of overlapping “wedges’ or “double wedges’ that allowed exploration of the vertical colored bands created where the edges met. “Striped Suit”, 1982, a large double wedge canvas was featured on the cover of Arts Magazine with an essay by Steven Henry Madoff, Looking for Thornton Willis: A Treatise.^[8] With the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1984, Willis exhibited Red Warrior in An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.^[9] By 1984 the work had changed again as Willis sought a more complex geometry.^[10] By 1990 he had gone back to the triangle but this time in an overall grid for which he coined the term “biomorphic cubism”. The "Triangle" paintings would span a decade from 1990-2000.

The Triangle Paintings

In 1991, Willis showed new work at the

In 2005, Willis teamed up with fellow painter, James Little [13] for a two-person show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the Sideshow Gallery working with owner-painter, Richard Timperio.^[14] Since 2007, Willis has shown with the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York City,^[15] with one-person exhibitions in 2007, 2009 and 2011. Willis has sustained a long-term relationship with art dealer Harris begun in 1980 when she co-founded Oscarsson Hood Gallery, on 57th street.

The Grid Paintings

Shortly after the exhibition entitled Painting: 40 Years,” a retrospective at the Sideshow Gallery in 2007,^[16] Willis returned to a rectilinear format. Combining the early "Slat" paintings, with exploration of form and field in his “Wedge” series, he created a body of work he entitled “Lattices” where lines appear to weave forward and back. Michael Feldman documented the transition to this new work in a film, in 2008-09, Portrait of an American Painter ^[17] In 2009, Willis had a one-person show at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, with catalog entitled The Lattice Paintings essay, by James Panero^[18] of The New Criterion.^[19] In his essay, Panero writes, “Ever since his wedge paintings in 1970s, Thornton has played with the density of volumes, the interaction of colors to come forward and recede, and the character of the line.” ^[20]

Two years later, in 2011, Willis took on form over field where form or volume appear to dominate the line. The resulting images harken to the dense mass of city buildings and maps. In an essay for this new series, Lance Esplund writes: “Those who have followed Willis’s work over the years may see his current series of paintings as a departure from “Slats” of the 1960s, the “Wedges,” or “Fins,” of the 1970s and early ’80s, the triangular facets of recent years, and the “Lattice” paintings from his last show, in 2009, at Elizabeth Harris. But all of these pictures have in common the allover surface plane held in tension, between figure and ground, as an interwoven field. They also share the subject of the urban landscape” ^[21]

Willis continued to show with Elizabeth Harris, and in April 2013, had a one-person show of new “Step” paintings. The artist included in the show, consisting predominantly of his paintings, several three dimensional painted wall pieces or assemblages. The wall sculptures, starting with a painted canvas base, are built up with layers of found objects and painted wood. Also in April and May 2013, two large paintings by Willis were exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison, New York, in the exhibition entitled, “Works of the Jenney Archive.”

Selected museum and public collections

• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
• The
  Whitney Museum of American Art
  , New York, NY
• The
  Phillips Collection
  , Washington, D.C
• Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art
  , Ridgefield, Ct.
• Albright-Knox Art Gallery
  , Buffalo, NY
• Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
• Carnegie Museums
  , Pittsburgh, PA
• Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
• New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
• Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
• Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
• The
  Arkansas Art Center
  , Little Rock, AR
• Museum of Broadcasting
  , NYC
• The Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney, Australia
• The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
• Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK
• Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
• Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC
• Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN
• Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan UT
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
• Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV
• Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
• The
  Herb and Dorothy Vogel
  Collection, New York, NY

Awards

• The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Painting Fellowship, 2001
• Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Fellowship, 1991
• National Endowment for the Arts, Printmaking Fellowship, 1984
• National Endowment for the Arts, Painting Fellowship, 1980
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Painting Fellowship, 1979

Selected Books and Catalogues

Thornton Willis: Interviews & Essays, copyright 2018, ISBN 978-0-9906194-8-2, Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954106, Greenpoint Press Art Books, Greenpoint Press NY, accepted into Library of Congress

• Tom Armstrong, A singular Vision: Architecture Art Landscape, Copyright 2011,
  ISBN 978-1-59372-043-8
  Frontise-piece pp. 1, 207 Printed by Quantuck Lane Press, NY, Distributed by W.W. Norton and Company, NY
• Exhibition Catalogue, Thornton Willis, copyright 2011, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, essay copyright 2011 Lance Esplund
• Exhibition Catalogue, Thornton Willis: The Lattice Paintings, copyright 2009, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, essay copyright 2009 James Panero
• The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, produced by the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington DC.,
  ISBN 9780615232713
  , repro. p. 79
• Peter Bellamy, The Artist Project: Portraits of the Real Art World / New Artists 1981-1990, published by IN Publishing New York, New York, 1991,
  ISBN 0-9625994-1-7
  , p. 240
• The Phillips Collection, A Summary Catalogue, 1985,
  ISBN 0-943044-05-7
  , repro. p. 251
• Carrier, David, “The Aesthete in the City; The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s,” The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park Pennsylvania, 1994, Chapters 10 (p188) and 13 (p 225),
  ISBN 0-271-00943-8
• Artists of the ‘80’s: Selected works from the Maslow Collection, published by the Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes College, Wilkes-Barre, PA., 1989,
  ISBN 0-942945-01-8
  Frontispiece (color), pp. 74-75
• C.E. Licka, Thornton Willis’ Abstract Syntax, Thornton Willis Recent Work: Paintings and Drawings, a catalogue, published by the University of Southern Mississippi, 1985, Copyrights, on the occasion of the University of Southern Mississippi's 75th Anniversary, intro. by Chairman William C. Baggett Jr.
• David Carrier, Theoretical Perspectives on the Arts, Sciences and Technology, Part II: Postmodernist Art Criticism, Leonardo, Vol. 18, No.2, 1985, repro. 109, p. 112
• Kynaston McShine, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, copyright 1984 by Museum of Modern Art, New York, Library of Congress Catalog,
  ISBN 0-87070-391-9
  , repros. pp. 322–323
• Joseph Masheck, “Historical Present: Essays of the 1970s,” Contemporary American Art Critics, No. 3, edited by Donald Kuspit, UMI Research Press, Michigan, 1984, Chapter 22, pp249–257, “Thornton Willis and Abstract Identity”
• Exhibition catalogue, ARS: 83 Helsinki, The Art Museum of the Ateneum, 1983,
  ISBN 951-9289-08-9
  repro. pp. 190–191
• Exhibition Catalogue, Donald Kuspit and Fernando Pernes, LIS ’81: Lisbon international Show, International Exhibition of Drawings, published by Direccao, 1982 repros. p. 427
• Exhibition Catalogue, Georgia Coopersmith, 20th Anniversary Exhibition of the Vogel Collection, published by the Brainerd Art Gallery, Potsdam, NY. 1982,
  ISBN 0-942746-03-1
  repro., unpaginated.
• Exhibition catalogue, Thomas W. Leavitt and Anita Feldman, Painting Up Front, published by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca NY.
  OCLC 7725107
  . Statement and repro, unpaginated
• RE-VIEW: Artists on Art Magazine, Vol. II and III, no. 1, June 1979
  ISSN 0161-5114
  , repros. pp. 46-51
• RE-VIEW: Artists on Art Magazine, Vol. 1, no. 1, January 1978,
  ISSN 0161-5114
  pp. 53-57.
• Exhibition catalogue, Lyrical Abstraction, published by the Whitney Museum of American Arts, New York, NY.,
  OCLC 154498
  . 1971
• Exhibition catalogue, Richard Lanier, New Work: New York, published by the American Federation of Arts, New York, New York, Library of Congress Card no.
  OCLC 104047
  . 1970