The Art of Balcomb Greene

Balcomb Greene (1904-1990) and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art. They were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end.... In his study of the figure he did not stress anatomical shape but rather its intuitive, often conflicting spirit. Balcomb Greene contributed to modernist cause through his writings: "It is actually the artist, and only he, who is equipped for approaching the individual directly. The abstract artist can approach man through the most immediate of aesthetic experiences, touching below consciousness and the veneer of attitudes, contacting the whole ego rather than the ego on the defensive." His first solo shows were in Paris in 1937, and at J. B. Newmann's New Art Circle, in New York, in 1947. From 1950 to 1961 he exhibited annually at Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, where his 1950, 1955, and 1956 exhibitions were nominated by Art News as among the year's ten best. After receiving his master's degree in art history (New York University, 1943), Greene taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, while also continuing to pursue a career as an artist. Balcomb Greene in 1976 was given the Altman First Prize in Figure Painting and the same year he became the member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.