Henry Pearson Mixed Media

Label from Obelisk Gallery verso. Henry C. Pearson (October 8, 1914 – December 3, 2006) was an American abstract and modernist painter. Pearson was born in Kinston, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1938, and studied theatrical design at Yale University. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Second World War, designing maps for the Okinawa campaign, and then re-enlisted to serve in the US occupation of Japan, where he was influenced by Japanese art and theatre forms. Henry Pearson is perhaps best known for a mildly optical manner of painting, featuring a mutable labyrinth of undulating parallel lines, which somewhat inadvertently linked him to the Op Art movement of the 1960s. Although included in the Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition The Responsive Eye in 1965, his work displays an intuitive rhythm and poetic elegance that falls well outside of the calculated, often hard-edged quality normally associated with the Op group of artists. Pearson came late to the visual arts. His first career, in theatre design, was cut short by the Second World War. He entered the U.S. Army in 1942, and at war's end requested duty in occupied Japan, where a prolonged contact with Japanese culture nurtured a passion for painting. Upon his discharge from the army, in 1953, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied with, among others, Reginald Marsh and Will Barnet. Inspired by Malevich, he turned to rectilinear abstraction, and employed it as the dominant means of expression in his painting between 1954 and 1961. As early as 1959, however, sensing an incipient decadence in his geometric canvases...