In our late capitalist age of business fabrication and reproducible artwork, Myron Stout stands out as a reclusive determine who was by no means lured by these methods. With monkish devotion, he produced a small physique of modestly sized black and white work in addition to drawings completed in charcoal, graphite, and conte pencil, whereas dwelling in Provincetown, a distant seaside city on the tip of Massachusetts. By no means searching for consideration, the artist, who lived from 1908 to 1987, was the topic of solely 5 exhibitions throughout his lifetime. Sanford Schwartz, who curated his 1980 retrospective on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, wrote in 1975: “The smallness of Stout’s output is spectacular — he’s with Vermeer in that department.”
Whereas it’s broadly believed that Vermeer created 60 work in his lifetime, 36 of which have survived, Stout’s output in portray was in all probability even smaller. Famously fussy in regards to the rounded, archaic types that preoccupied him from the mid-Nineteen Fifties till 1980, when blindness prevented him from persevering with together with his apply, he produced fewer than two dozen work and an equal variety of graphite pencil drawings, a medium he turned to within the late Nineteen Fifties as a substitute for charcoal. This enabled him to realize a wider vary of subtly completely different tones, whereas shifting the pencil’s linear marks to even surfaces of grey.
Myron Stout, “Untitled” (undated), charcoal on Strathmore paper
As a longtime admirer of Stout’s artwork, I used to be thrilled to study a big cache of unknown works that make up the exhibition Myron Stout: Charcoal Drawings at Peter Freeman, Inc. Nonetheless, strolling round this superbly put in present, I used to be stunned by how decisive and looking out his artwork appeared as soon as he moved away from geometric figures to pared-down geometric abstraction. All however two of the 35 charcoal drawings on view are rendered on identically sized sheets of Strathmore paper. The earliest works had been in all probability made within the Forties after World Struggle II, whereas he was finding out artwork with Hans Hofmann in New York, and the final ones had been possible completed shortly after he settled in Provincetown in 1952.
It was in Provincetown that Stout moved away from geometric portray and European abstraction and towards centered, symmetrical, biomorphic shapes impressed by his studying of Historical Greek mythology and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; he started to achieve consideration with this latter physique of labor. What this exhibition demonstrates is that Stout achieved an ascetic sensuality in his geometric abstractions, a paradoxical synthesis of restraint and hedonism that’s unmatched by any of his contemporaries.
Myron Stout, “Untitled” (undated), charcoal on Strathmore paper
The interval from 1946 to ’53, during which Stout made these drawings, overlaps with the breakthroughs of Clyfford Nonetheless and Jackson Pollock and the rise of what Clement Greenberg characterised as “American-Type Painting.” From the start, Stout was an outlier. He began off by making cubistic determine research in Hofmann’s class, which had not one of the muscular linearity we discover within the charcoal drawings of different college students, resembling Lee Krasner and Paul Resika. As soon as he started making geometric black and white works, he sought to create a pointy pressure between the paper’s flat aircraft and containing edges and the diagonal association of the black and white rectangles. His blacks vary in density from sooty to ashy, a results of controlling the stress.
In his beautiful calibration of density, interlocking of various sized shapes, and use of cropping, Stout has no peer. What appears to be like easy at first is definitely a posh matter of positive tuning. When he makes a black rectangle, he doesn’t simply fill it in. He’s attentive to the repetitive route of the mark in addition to the extent of stress to use to attain an general evenness of shade. In his geometric abstractions, he strikes nearer to the conte crayon works of Georges Seurat, one thing that may come to fruition in his graphite pencil drawings. Stout exhibits us that perfection might be achieved by consideration to the fundamental motion and stress of the hand; it’s one thing that may solely be realized from expertise. The affected person singularity of his pursuit is breathtaking.
Myron Stout, “Untitled” (1950), charcoal on Strathmore paper
Myron Stout, “Untitled” (undated), charcoal on Strathmore paper
Myron Stout: Charcoal Drawings continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Avenue, Soho, Manhattan) by March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.