Ben Wilson
Words and Deeds

Name: Words and Deeds
Brand: Ben Wilson
Price: 5000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Words and Deeds Oil and collage on wood panel, c. 1990 Signed recto lower right (see photo) Verso: See photo Signed, verso: Ben Wilson Dated: c. 1990 Titled: Words and Deeds Condition: Excellent Image/panel size: 23 1/4 x 19 inches Frame size: 26 1/4 x 21 1/4 inches To gain exposure to a wider range of styles, he also studied at the National Academy of Design and at the Educational Alliance. Admired by critics throughout his long career, Wilson was singled out as a “discovery” by the New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewel even before his rst one-man show at the Galerie Neuf in 1946. His paintings of the ’30s and ’40s were expressionistically rendered, often Biblical parables, lled with what he called “the grief of the intolerable” and reecting an acute awareness of the agony of the time, from the Holocaust to the Spanish Civil War. A WPA artist who identied strongly with the plight of the Jews in Europe, he relentlessly explored themes of war, torment, and futility in his early decades of painting. When times changed and social pressures subsided, Wilson’s mood lifted. He spent 1952-54 in Paris working at the Academie Julien. During the ’50s his involvement with specic imagery persisted but became more psychological and mythic in orientation. Inuenced by Cubism, he created a vocabulary of interlocking shapes and bold, sweeping gestures that served as a transition between his early gurative expressionism and his later abstract constructivist concerns. Towards the end of the decade Wilson reached a crossroads, moving towards abstraction and searching for what he called “a scaffolding under the externals.” By 1960, inuenced by the Russian Constructivists, Mondrian, and Abstract Expressionism, Wilson turned to abstraction. Reexamining the basic elements of painting, he evolved his own personal vocabulary and structure, fusing the cerebral and the emotive. He became increasingly experimental, using house paint, sand, and other unorthodox materials in paintings that he worked from all directions, dripping, spraying, stenciling, and collaging. He employed elements of disjunction, repetitions of geometric motifs, linear networks, and complex overlays to create the transparent, multi-layer development of space that characterizes his later paintings. A consummate draftsman, Wilson lled notebook after notebook with drawings that he amplied in his paintings. Eschewing popular movements, Wilson was always one to pursue a personal aesthetic. Despite more than 30 one-man shows and 50 years of teaching, he increasingly withdrew from the gallery scene but continued to paint daily until his death at age 88 in 2001 in Blairstown, New Jersey, where he and his sculptor wife Evelyn Wilson lived and worked in their rustic Revolutionary War-era stone house and studio. As well as in private collections, Wilson’s work is represented in numerous museum and university collections. Montclair State University, in Montclair, New Jersey, permanently houses his art estate and papers, a portion of which is also included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. ( Courtesy Ben Wilson)

Creator:

Ben Wilson (1913-2001, American)

Dimensions:

Height: 23.25 in (59.06 cm)Width: 19 in (48.26 cm)

Medium:

Oil

Movement & Style:

Abstract

Period:

1990-1999

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Fairlawn, OH

Reference Number:

Seller: FA109151stDibs: LU14014228412

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Ben Wilson

Born in Philadelphia, Ben Wilson was a New York Abstract Expressionist painter. His work was exhibited frequently from the mid-1930s through the 1960s, and less frequently but consistently through the rest of the century. Decade by decade beginning in the 1930s his painting comprises a micro history of the period’s art, while depicting what was foremost in the American consciousness of the time.

Wilson’s earliest work shows an intense awareness of social and economic turmoil of the 1930s. Dominating the content was the flow of world events beginning with the Spanish Civil War and followed by the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the plight of the persecuted, displaced and slaughtered minorities. Wilson was concerned with representing humanity and suffering in a changed world.

By the late 1950s Wilson began using abstraction in his paintings, merging himself with the “New York School” of art. He shared many of the values of Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns.

Through the 1960s, Wilson completed his transition to abstraction, exhibited in New York and Paris and received a Ford Foundation artist-in-residence grant. As the decade progressed he became increasingly experimental with his mediums, using house paint, sand and other unorthodox materials.

Ever one to pursue a personal aesthetic path regardless of popular movements and critical reactions, Wilson increasingly withdrew from the New York art scene from the 1970s on.

Throughout his life Wilson painted and drew every day. He left behind a large body of work and an extensive archive, including exhibition catalogues, reviews, and correspondence that are now part of the permanent collection of the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University. A portion of his archives is in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Wilson is listed in Who’s Who in Art; Who’s Who in the East; Dictionary of International Biography; American Artists of Renown and International Encyclopedia of Artists. His work is in numerous public collections, including the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum, New York, NY; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers University Art Library and Classics Department, New Brunswick, NJ; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA; Norfolk Museum, Norfolk, VA; and Fairleigh Dickinson University Collection of Self-Portraits, NJ.

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(Biography provided by Quogue Gallery)