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Balcomb Greene"Composition" Balcomb Greene, Geometric Abstract, Early Modernist Composition1936
1936
$45,000
£34,234.65
€40,030.81
CA$62,934.50
A$70,699.77
CHF 37,625.61
MX$874,229.81
NOK 458,472.29
SEK 443,276.91
DKK 298,592.44
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About the Item
Balcomb Greene
Composition, 1936
Signed Balcomb Greene on verso upper stretcher bar
Signed on backing board: Balcomb Greene
Oil on canvas
30 1/4 x 46 inches
Provenance:
The artist
A.C.A Galleries, Inc, New York
Private Collection, New York
Estate of the above, 2024
Exhibitions:
New York, Zabriskie Gallery, American Geometric Abstraction Of the 1930s, June 1 - July 14, 1972; this exhibition traveled to University at North Carolina at Greensboro, The Weatherspoon Art Gallery, September 9 - October 1, 1972;
Dallas Museum of Art, October 8 - November 19, 1972.
Literature:
Robert Beverly Hale, The Art of Balcomb Greene, New York, 1977, p. 28, illustrated.
Balcomb Greene began his art career only after he married Gertrude Glass in 1926. He had studied philosophy and psychology as a student at Syracuse University, and spent a year doing graduate work in psychology in Vienna. In 1927, the Greenes returned to New York, where Balcomb pursued advanced study in English literature. For the following three years, Greene taught English at Dartmouth College and wrote fiction. After the couple went to Paris for a year late in 1931, Greene began to experiment with painting. He worked independently at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but beyond this brief exposure to art school, he taught himself by frequenting the cafés of Paris and by looking at the new art to be seen in the French capital. He was fascinated with both Picasso and Matisse, but Juan Gris, Piet Mondrian, and the members of the Abstraction-Création group exercised special influence on Greene's development of a personal, artistic style.
In Paris, Greene quickly developed an acute analytical sense for modernism. After he and his wife settled in New York early in 1933, Greene published articles on art in Art Front, the magazine of the Artists' Union, as well as in several other publications. With his wife, he was active in several artists' organizations; in 1935 and 1936 he served as editor of Art Front, and he became the first chairman of the American Abstract Artists, a post to which he was twice reelected. In addition, Greene helped draft the group's charter, served on the editorial committee for the 1938 yearbook, and designed the cover for the first publication.
Until the WPA was formed in 1935, Greene made a precarious living writing for two sensationalist newspapers, Broadway Brevities and Graft. After joining the WPA, he painted abstract murals for the Hall of Medicine at the 1939 New York World's Fair and for the Williamsburg Housing Project, and he designed a stained-glass window for a school in the Bronx. About 1940, Greene began working on a master's degree in art history at New York University. In 1942, he accepted a post at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he taught art history until 1959. The Pittsburgh move did not mean cutting New York ties for the Greenes. The couple commuted between the two cities, and in 1947 purchased land atMontauk Point, Long Island, where they spent as much time as possible.
It was not until the 1950s that Greene began to exhibit with any frequency. He had shown his earliest paintings—admixtures of realism, fantasy, and incongruous stylistic elements— in Paris in 1932. His work was featured at J.B. Neumann's New Art Circle in 1947, and in 1950, Greene began exhibiting at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York. By this time his painting had undergone a fairly dramatic stylistic shift. During the 1930s, Greene worked with angular, geometric planes, intersecting and overlaying color to create distinctive spatial configurations. Completely nonobjective, his forms often functioned as objects in space, their perspectives controlled through the juxtaposition of diagonal and rectilinear structure. Greene often worked out compositions by making small paper collages, such as the Untitled works identified as "34–8", "35–4", "35–7", and "39–03". Intended as preparatory studies, these collages represented a thinking-through process and lack the surface finish that characterized his oils.
Around 1943, Greene again began using the human figure in his work. Although not conscious of Surrealist influences, Greene's odd merging of geometric space with organically abstracted human figures—evident, for example, in Way Down Blue of 1945— represents a distinctly Surrealist impression. By the late 1940s, Greene began a clear transition to the figurative style for which he is now well known. Light entered his work as an abstract compositional device, as did a desire to reflect fundamental humanist concerns. Beyond his involvement in artists' groups and his own paintings, Greene contributed significantly to the modernist cause through his eloquent and perceptive essays. He believed that the artist had a special gift for speaking directly to the individual:
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."
- Creator:Balcomb Greene (1904-1990, American)
- Creation Year:1936
- Dimensions:Height: 30.25 in (76.84 cm)Width: 46 in (116.84 cm)
- More Editions & Sizes:Unique workPrice: $45,000
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1841214665862
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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