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Balcomb Greene "The Cliffs", 1978
About the Item
The Cliffs by Balcomb Greene painted in 1978. Signed on the front titled and dated on the reverse.
Paintings of the Montauk coast by Balcomb Greene are few and far between. This painting likely created at his Studio in Montauk New York. Painting is in excellent original condition and retains the original gallery frame.
provenance: Estate of Gertrude B. Pascal / Gifted from the previous in 1987, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY / Christie's, New York 2012 / Private Collection, New Jersey
Public collections:
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR
Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Parrish Museum, Southampton, NY
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Boca Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL
Over a lifespan of 86 years, Balcomb Greene followed his muse wherever it led, unfettered by what had come before, unafraid of where the future might lead. Despite a series of different pathways explored, his purpose remained ever constant: to express truth as he found it and communicate it to a broader audience. In the 1930s, Greene was a young artist committed to abstraction as his expressive language. Greene’s paintings and collages of the 1930s reflect the influence of Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian and put him in the company of fellow Americans, including Ibram Lassaw, Josef Albers, Ilya Boltowsky and George L. K. Morris, all among the founding members, in 1936, of American Abstract Artists.
John Wesley Greene, his christened name which he never legally changed, was born in 1904 in Millville, New York, the third child and only son of Methodist minister The Reverend Bertram Stillman Greene (1864–1929) and Florence Stover Greene (1876–1911). His family on both sides were Revolutionary-era colonists, originally living in Connecticut and Vermont before joining the Yankee migration to the western frontier of New York State. In 1922, John Wesley Greene enrolled at Syracuse University aided by a scholarship for the sons of Methodist ministers and intending to fulfill the promise of his name and follow his father into the ministry. As with so many before and after him, the liberal education he absorbed at Syracuse broadened his horizons and reshaped his life plan. Studying philosophy, psychology, and literature, along the way he separated himself from organized religion. During his senior year, on a visit to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Greene was introduced to Gertrude Glass (1904–1956), an art student and the Brooklyn-born daughter of Latvian Jewish immigrants.
Following Greene’s graduation, the two married in 1926 and went to Europe. They stopped briefly in Paris but spent most of their time in Vienna where Greene had a fellowship to study psychology. When they returned to New York in 1927, Greene enrolled in a master’s program in ‘English literature at Columbia University. When his thesis advisor rejected his essay topic on the “fallen woman” in seventeenth-century literature as inappropriate, he left without a degree. From 1928 until 1931, Greene taught English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. At some point, he stopped using his given name, John, and began to call himself, more distinctively, Balcomb, the family name of his paternal grandmother.
While Greene wrote three novels (all unpublished) during his teaching years at Dartmouth, his wife was a working artist, and he eventually developed an interest of his own in painting. In 1931, Greene gave up his teaching position and he and Gertrude went to Paris, determined to immerse themselves in the modern art ferment they had briefly experienced in their earlier visit. For young Americans with no prescribed agenda, a receptiveness to innovation, and wide-open eyes and minds. Paris, in 1931, offered a rich stew of approaches to modern art. The city absorbed and transmuted an international mélange of styles—cubism, orphism, futurism, dadaism, constructivism, neoplasticism, suprematism, de Stijl, Bauhaus—France encountering Holland, Germany, Italy, and Russia with Pablo Picasso from Spain, Constantin Brancusi from Romania, and Jacques Lipchitz from Lithuania. As a sculptor, Gertrude Greene was fascinated by the constructivism of the Russian brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner as well as the work of Brancusi, Jean Arp, and Jacques Lipshitz. Initially, according to plan, Gertrude sculpted while her husband continued to write. Soon, however, Greene felt the pull of the expressive possibilities of paint and registered for instruction at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, an inexpensive and loosely organized school.
Balcombe Greene found in abstraction the means of communication that had eluded him as an aspiring minister, as a psychologist, and as a teacher and writer of fiction. Artists had long recognized the influence of hidden geometries in influencing viewer’s perceptions and reactions to their works. Twentieth-century abstraction or “non-objective” art, dispensed with recognizable figural images and manipulated geometry and color, aiming, as with earlier art, to reach the viewer on a level below conscious awareness. This would be art in a new language for a new society, appealing to the senses but free from the baggage of the past and the accusation that photography had rendered art pointless. Balcomb Greene’s abstraction was essentially an optimistic art, its clean geometries conveying the anticipation of the better future that science and technology appeared to promise to citizens of the twentieth century, most especially to Americans.
Balcomb and Gertrude Greene returned to New York City in 1932, invigorated by the possibilities for their art, but facing a catastrophic general financial depression that severely curtailed the ability of fine artists to earn a living. They settled in Greenwich Village surrounded by fellow artists. The Greenes plunged into arts advocacy, active participants in the American Artists’ Union, founded in 1933 to agitate for government support for struggling artists. Balcomb Greene’s literary powers of persuasion found an outlet in Art Front, the magazine of the Artist’s Union published from 1934 to 1937 where he was a regular contributor as well as a member of the editorial board. He scrambled for any work he could find work, until about 1935 when political pressure was rewarded with a series of New Deal programs designed to put artists to work to produce public art funded by public money. Abstract art, however, continued to be an outlier, both for public money and for acceptance of work by Americans into major museum shows and collections. Politically it proved an irresistible target for elected officials who happily appointed themselves as the sensible guardians of the taxpayers’ money. Even in the art world where abstraction was appreciated as a European avant-garde import, the work of Americans working in the style was dismissed as derivative and thus largely ignored.
In 1936, a group of abstract artists began meeting to explore possibilities for group exhibitions. Balcomb and Gertrude Greene were among a nucleus of nine artists involved in the discussions. A general call to expand the effort went out. In January 1937, a large meeting of artists agreed to form an organization to be called American Abstract Artists, a general enough name to accommodate the diversity of styles included within the group. Balcomb Greene served as the first chairman of American Abstract Artists and as chairman again in 1939 and 1941. He was a major contributor to its charter and edited and wrote for its annual yearbook. In 1937 the group staged its first exhibition at the Squibb Gallery in New York featuring the work of 39 members including both Balcomb and Gertrude Greene. Gertrude Greene was the group’s first paid employee, sitting at the show’s reception desk. Instead of a catalogue the group issued a portfolio of lithographs of the works in the show, printing 500 copies. The exhibition received wide publicity and predictably mixed reviews ranging from sneers to enthusiasm. Second and third and fourth exhibitions with publications followed in 1938, 1939, and 1940.
Balcomb Greene was fundamentally an intellectual. In 1940, he went back to school once again, this time for a master’s degree in art history from the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 1942 to 1959, he taught art history and aesthetics at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University). Although Greene never stopped painting, his art began to change, reflecting as always, his openness to use whatever means he thought most suitable to express his meaning. He commuted between his obligations in Pittsburgh and his life in New York. With new time constraints and a changing world, he resigned in 1942 from American Abstract Artists. (Although in Pittsburgh, in 1944, he was among four co-founders of “The Abstract Group.”) In 1947, he and Gertrude purchased property in Montauk, Long Island where they built a studio home.
- Creator:Balcomb Greene (Artist)
- Dimensions:Height: 62 in (157.48 cm)Width: 56 in (142.24 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
- Style:Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1978
- Condition:
- Seller Location:Hudson, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU8210235512482
Balcomb Greene
Balcomb Greene has been described as "an iconoclast, a painter who has refused to conform to the latest artistic trends." This comment was apt, for Greene was an independent-minded artist who followed his own aesthetic inclinations regardless of what was in vogue among critics and the public. At the outset of his career, he eschewed Depression-era realism in favor of a cutting-edge geometric abstract style that set him apart from the mainstream art establishment and from many of his fellow abstractionists. During the 1940s, when non-representational painting came into fashion, he began to incorporate the human form into his work, creating enigmatic figure paintings in which variations of light and shadow played a vital role in creating mood. A turning point in his career occurred in 1931, when Greene and his wife, Gertrude Glass Greene, traveled to Paris to further their understanding of vanguard art and literature. Although Greene intended to write novels in his Montparnasse studio, he soon found himself drawn to the art world and decided to become a painter. He was especially inspired by the example of Piet Mondrian, Juan Gris and the Abstraction-Creation painters, who sought to eliminate all references to nature, literature and anecdote by focusing on pure abstraction. Greene returned to the United States in 1932, going on to develop his own hard-edged abstract style, creating what he referred to as "straight line, flat paintings." In 1937, he became a founding member and first chairman of Abstract American Artists, established to promote the cause of abstraction in national art circles. In the 1930s, Greene found employment with the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. He created an abstract mural for the Federal Hall of Medicine at the World's Fair of 1939. In 1940, Greene began studying art history at New York University, going on to receive a master's degree in 1943. During this period, his aesthetic approach changed as he abandoned the crisply rendered and brightly colored forms of his geometric work in favor of the figure shown against a backdrop of fragmented planes. He went on to create paintings, often naturalistic depictions of the female nude, that were characterized by an expressionist handling of paint and a limited palette of whites, greys and other muted tones that derived from his interest in photography. In 1947 Greene purchased some land on Montauk Point, Long Island. With the exception of a trip to Paris in 1958-60, he spent most of his time on Long Island, where he was one of the pioneers of the East End art colony. Inspired by the proximity of the ocean, he painted a number of marines, using dynamic brushwork to evoke the energy and spirit of the sea. Greene taught aesthetics and art history at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (1942-47), where his students included Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein.
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