Ben Wilson
Untitled
c. 1970

Name: Untitled
Brand: Ben Wilson
Price: 16500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Oil on masonite. Like many of his compatriots in the New York School, Ben Wilson (1913-2001) began his career painting figuratively before transitioning to abstraction after WWII (and somewhat later than his compatriots.) However, because he started in a different place than they did, he ended up in a different place. His starting place was the cubism of Picasso, Braque and Leger, and their influence never left him. A critic in the Princeton Review in 1987 wrote: "Ben Wilson's canvases, while still within the abstract expressionist mode, retain echoes of Picasso, Braque and even mechanistic elements of Fernand Leger." Another critic writes: "The expressive abstractions of Ben Wilson belong among the best work created by New York artists in the 20th century; but they stand outside the critical labels applied to Abstract Expressionism..." Ben Wilson had more than 30 one-man shows during his lifetime, first starting to show in the early 1930s. As early as 1942, he was singled out by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell as a "discovery." He exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum (1934), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Corcoran, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, among others. His work is in the collection of the Newark Museum and the Montclair Museum. Wilson has recently been "rediscovered" and was the subject of a one-man show at Quogue Gallery in 2017 and Montclair State University.

Creator:

Ben Wilson (1913-2001, American)

Creation Year:

c. 1970

Dimensions:

Height: 42 in (106.68 cm)Width: 48 in (121.92 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1970-1979

Framing:

Framing Options Available

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Lawrence, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU1497210644552

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Ben Wilson

Born in Philadelphia, Ben Wilson was a New York Abstract Expressionist painter. His work was exhibited frequently from the mid-1930s through the 1960s, and less frequently but consistently through the rest of the century. Decade by decade beginning in the 1930s his painting comprises a micro history of the period’s art, while depicting what was foremost in the American consciousness of the time.

Wilson’s earliest work shows an intense awareness of social and economic turmoil of the 1930s. Dominating the content was the flow of world events beginning with the Spanish Civil War and followed by the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the plight of the persecuted, displaced and slaughtered minorities. Wilson was concerned with representing humanity and suffering in a changed world.

By the late 1950s Wilson began using abstraction in his paintings, merging himself with the “New York School” of art. He shared many of the values of Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

Through the 1960s, Wilson completed his transition to abstraction, exhibited in New York and Paris and received a Ford Foundation artist-in-residence grant. As the decade progressed he became increasingly experimental with his mediums, using house paint, sand and other unorthodox materials.

Ever one to pursue a personal aesthetic path regardless of popular movements and critical reactions, Wilson increasingly withdrew from the New York art scene from the 1970s on.

Throughout his life Wilson painted and drew every day. He left behind a large body of work and an extensive archive, including exhibition catalogues, reviews, and correspondence that are now part of the permanent collection of the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University. A portion of his archives is in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Wilson is listed in Who’s Who in Art; Who’s Who in the East; Dictionary of International Biography; American Artists of Renown and International Encyclopedia of Artists. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, New York, NY; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers University Art Library and Classics Department, New Brunswick, NJ; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA; Norfolk Museum, Norfolk, VA; and Fairleigh Dickinson University Collection of Self-Portraits, NJ.

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(Biography provided by Quogue Gallery)