Alton Pickens Paintings

Alton Pickens was born in Seattle, Washington in 1917. His adolescence was spent under the shadow of the great depression, the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War. With his schoolmates, he watched ships being loaded with scrap iron for Japan and debated the threat of Japanese or Bolshevik invasion of our West Coast. At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which he attended, there were no art courses, but his interest in art was given strong encouragement by Lloyd Reynolds, his professor of English. Pickens went on a scholarship to the Portland Art Museum School but after a few months, he was drawn to New York where, he says, he learned from observing artists at work and frequenting the museums. Earning a livelihood at odd jobs, he confined himself for some time to ink drawing and woodcut, slowly learning the oil medium through the study of the old masters who, he felt had the most to teach him. He also greatly admires Goya, Daumier, Bonnard and Beckmann. Pickens had painted some of the most bizarre, disturbing and memorable images in recent American art. He first exhibited in 1942 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a woodcut in Artists for Victory. The Museum of Modern Art showed a painting in 1943 and included a group of his paintings in Fourteen Americans, 1946. He held his first one-man show in 1956. He taught art at Indiana University in Bloomington, spending a year in Europe in 1952–53.