John Havens Thornton

Untitled (Forms)

c. 1980s

John Havens Thornton, Untitled (1989) — oil on canvas This 1989 painting by John Havens Thornton is a geometric, quietly surreal still life: an open box casts a long shadow as three...

John Havens Thornton, Untitled (Box Open) (1988) — oil on canvas A prism-like form unfolds across a sandy field, its planes banded with rose, teal, amber, and violet that meet at a ...

John Havens Thornton, Untitled, 1990 — oil on canvas A pair of crystalline forms share a stage of cream and midnight, their planes banded with teal, rose, violet, amber, and oxblood...

John Havens Thornton, Untitled, 2008 — oil on canvas A lively, folded structure rises from a pale field, its planes switching between electric turquoise, umber, rust, and slate as c...

ROBINSON, Geoffrey (b.1945) More Than You Know 1996 41.8 x 29.5 cm Unframed Geoffrey Robinson trained at Bournemouth College of Art in the 1960’s, before a career in advertising and...

Alvin Hollingsworth American, 1928-2000 A Still Life Oil on canvas 36 by 24 in. W/frame 42 by 30 in. Alvin was a member of the prominent Spiral group. Spiral was formed in 1963 in the New York studio of Romare Bearden. Spiral members aimed to address civil and human rights concerns and show support for the Civil Rights Movement. They did not, however, want to adhere to strict aesthetic criteria or compromise their artistic individuality. Spiral also included Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Emma Amos...

Frank Shifreen Still Life 2021 18 x 24 inches Acrylic on Canvas Signed, titled and dated on verso These new works start from polar opposite impulses which juxtapose the purity and ...

Charles Houghton Howard was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the third of five children in a cultured and educated family with roots going back to the Massachusetts Bay colony. His father, John Galen Howard, was an architect who had trained at M.I.T. and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and apprenticed in Boston with Henry Hobson Richardson. In New York, the elder Howard worked for McKim, Mead and White before establishing a successful private practice. Mary Robertson Bradbury Howard, Charles’s mother, had studied art before her marriage. John Galen Howard moved his household to California in 1902 to assume the position of supervising architect of the new University of California campus at Berkeley and to serve as Professor of Architecture and the first Dean of the School of Architecture (established in 1903). The four Howard boys grew up to be artists and all married artists, leaving a combined family legacy of art making in the San Francisco Bay area that endures to this day, most notably in design, murals, and reliefs at the Coit Tower and in buildings on the Berkeley campus. Charles Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1921 as a journalism major and pursued graduate studies in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities before embarking on a two-year trip to Europe. Howard went to Europe as a would-be writer. But a near-religious experience, seeing a picture by Giorgione in a remote town outside of Venice, proved a life-altering epiphany. In his own words, “I cut the tour at once and hurried immediately back to Paris, to begin painting. I have been painting whenever I could ever since” (Charles Howard, “What Concerns Me,” Magazine of Art 39 [February 1946], p. 63). Giorgione’s achievement, in utilizing a structured and rational visual language of art to convey high emotion on canvas, instantly convinced Howard that painting, and not literature, offered the best vehicle to express what he wanted to say. Howard returned to the United States in 1925, confirmed in his intent to become an artist. Howard settled in New York and supported himself as a painter in the decorating workshop of Louis Bouché and Rudolph Guertler, where he specialized in mural painting. Devoting spare time to his own work, he lived in Greenwich Village and immersed himself in the downtown avant-garde cultural milieu. The late 1920s and early 1930s were the years of Howard’s art apprenticeship. He never pursued formal art instruction, but his keen eye, depth of feeling, and intense commitment to the process of art making, allowed him to assimilate elements of painting intuitively from the wide variety of art that interested him. He found inspiration in the modernist movements of the day, both for their adherence to abstract formal qualities and for the cosmopolitan, international nature of the movements themselves. Influenced deeply by Surrealism, Howard was part of a group of American and European Surrealists clustered around Julien Levy. Levy opened his eponymously-named gallery in 1931, and rose to fame in January 1932, when he organized and hosted Surrealisme, the first ever exhibition of Surrealism in America, which included one work by Howard. Levy remained the preeminent force in advocating for Surrealism in America until he closed his gallery in 1949. Howard’s association with Levy in the early 1930s confirms the artist’s place among the avant-garde community in New York at that time. In 1933, Howard left New York for London. It is likely that among the factors that led to the move were Howard’s desire to be a part of an international art community, as well as his marriage to English artist, Madge Knight...