PRESS RELEASE

Spanierman Gallery, LLC is pleased to announce the opening on November 20, 2008 of the exhibition and sale, Balcomb Greene: A Retrospective. Organized with the assistance of Greene’s widow Terryn Greene, the exhibition reveals a career that spanned over six decades by an artist who was a forward-thinking iconoclast, intellectual, and individualist.  Holding to his own perspective, Greene often turned in the opposite direction from the trends in the art world of his time, reflecting his commitment to his own passionate beliefs and his desire to face up to the risks and challenges that he set for himself. The exhibition is accompanied by a twenty-four-page catalogue with eighteen full-page color illustrations and an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.

Born in Millville, New York, just east of Niagara Falls, Greene (1904-1990) was the son of Bertram Stillman Greene, a Methodist minister and descendent of the Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene.  Christened John Wesley for Methodism’s founder, he later changed his name to Balcomb, his grandmother’s surname, due to his eventual disillusionment with religious sects.  He spent his childhood in small towns in Iowa, South Dakota, and Colorado, where his father preached, and initially planned to enter the ministry himself, but while attending Syracuse University (1922-26), he turned instead to philosophy, literature, and art, graduating with a degree in philosophy.

Greene married fellow artist Gertrude Glass (1904-1956) in 1926.  After a year in Europe—in Paris and Vienna—the couple returned to New York, where Greene began a master’s program in English literature at Columbia University.  Specializing in the novel, he ended up writing three himself, one of which was accepted for publication, but was not printed due to the onset of the Great Depression. After a period in which Greene taught English at Dartmouth College, the couple returned to Paris, where Balcomb found his attention increasingly drawn to art.  To satisfy this growing interest, he studied independently at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and simultaneously absorbed a knowledge of cubism, dada, and other modern trends.  His attention was drawn especially to the neo-plasticism of Piet Mondrian, the art of Juan Gris, and the Abstraction-Création group that included Georges Vantongerloo and Jean Hélion.  After returning to New York in 1932, Balcomb struggled to find work during the Great Depression, accepting a variety of jobs including producing murals for the WPA.  At the same time, drawing on his experience in Paris, he developed a distinctive abstract, structural style, creating hard-edged images that he referred to as “straight line, flat paintings.”  While many of his cohorts—including his wife—explored the biomorphic forms of surrealism, he focused on even lines, two-dimensional areas of color, and interlocking geometric shapes with which he produced a sense of space––a geometric landscape, of sorts, as may be seen in Black and Red Tension (1935), Floating Forms (ca. 1935), and Untitled #23 (ca. 1935). 

In 1937 Greene became a founding member and first chairman of Abstract American Artists (AAA), established to promote the cause of abstraction in national art circles (he was re-elected to the group’s chairmanship in 1939 and 1941). Greene helped draft the charter and edit the yearbook for the organization, whose other members included Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Werner Drewes, Albert E. Gallatin, Alice Trumbull Mason, and George L. K. Morris.  In 1940 Greene enrolled in the art history program at New York University.  After receiving his master’s degree, he assumed a position teaching aesthetics and art history at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he remained until 1959. Among his students were Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein, both of whom graduated in 1949. 

With the feeling that he had achieved the aims he had set for himself in his geometric works—of clarity and balance—Greene began to seek a more natural, spontaneous kind of action in his art, drawing inspiration from “the spirit of nature revealed by rocks, by land, and inevitably the ocean.”  Writing at the time that he believed “complete abstraction in art” to be “a dead end,”  he created works such as The Nautical Land (1943), The King is Blacker than the Queen (ca. 1945), and Age of Centaurs (1946), in which he incorporated biomorphic and anthropomorphic forms into surrealist, enigmatic images. 

In 1947 Greene purchased land on Montauk Point, Long Island, where he eventually built a house himself with cement-block walls, a butterfly roof, floors of weathered brick, and huge windows that looked over a high bluff.  This setting inspired the many images of the ocean he produced during his late career.  Long Island was a center of the abstract expressionism percolating in the late 1940s, following the arrival in The Springs in 1945 of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.  Although undoubtedly aware of this movement from the start, Greene turned in a reverse direction. Indeed, he was one of few artists of his time to resist the prevailing current: “I got bored with abstraction,” he would later recall. However, the change in his style was gradual, as he transitioned in stages from pure non-objectivity to figuration, with recognizable shapes materializing from nebulous spatial depths as time went on.  Greene followed this path despite pressure from his friends to abandon it and even their rejection.  He now turned to figural subjects. Deriving ideas from photographs he took of the figure in strictly controlled light conditions, he explored the tension between the sexual and spiritual natures of the human body, showing show figural forms that seem to emerge partially and organically from light that is abrupt and unchanneled, as may be seen in works such as The Women (1958). 

The death of Gertrude from cancer in 1956 was devasting to Balcomb, leading him to create a number of his most haunting images.  Several years later, in Paris, he met Terryn Trimpen, then host of a French television show.  Married in 1961, the couple settled in Montauk Point.  In the following period Balcomb further refined his style, receiving accolades from critics such as Brian O’Doherty who remarked in the New York Times (1962) that Greene handled “light like a maestro with mirrors” and commended his “unequaled” ability “to suggest by the art of leaving out.” Of 1960s works in which Greene further freed his figural forms from land and atmosphere, Emily Genauer remarked in the World Journal Tribune (1966): Greene has “come to the figure—and beautifully . . . [These works] have a spectral quality, but this has to do with their powerful emotional impact, not their firm controlled structural substance. This is distinguished, extremely individual painting by one of the country’s best artists.”  

Among the highlights of the exhibition are a number of images Greene created while living in Paris in 1960s in which he explored the figure in relation to the urban environment as well as a number of his ocean scenes in which he employed a muscular, gestural approach and organized his shapes in collage-like arrangements.  In the late 1970s, when many artists returned to figurative imagery, Greene was acknowledged as one of few to successfully merge the abstract and the representational.  As David L. Shirey wrote in 1978 in the New York Times: “Mr. Greene is one of those rare artists who make us feel as if the fusion were in the natural order of things.  Never do the figurative components appear awkward or alien to what is surrounding them. They fit.” 

It was, nonetheless, not a concern with the blending of the figurative and the formal that compelled Greene.  What became paramount for him as his career progressed was a desire for art to be situated within the realm of mankind rather than being simply a “separate and unrelated activity.”  His art reflects his personal trajectory of inquiry and independence.

Greene had his first one-man show at the Dartmouth College Art Gallery in 1931.   His second solo show occurred a year later in Paris. In 1934 he was included in exhibitions at Gallery Secession in New York, showing his work alongside that of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.  His work was included in exhibitions in New York during the 1940s at J. B. Neumann’s New Art Circle and the Bertha Schaefer Gallery.  In addition to his large exhibition at the Whitney in 1961, a retrospective of his work was held at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, in 1978.  He painted actively until 1985, when ill-health prevented him from continuing to work.  He died at his home at Montauk Point at the age of eighty-six.