REVINGTON ARTHUR

Current Exhibition

American artist and educator Revington Arthur 1908–1986 was an important and leading contributor to American art. Born in Glenbrock, Connecticut he studied at the Grand central School of Art and The Art Students League with Arshile Gorkiy, Kimon Nicolades, George Luks, and George Pearse Ennis, and other prominent American painters. He began professionally exhibiting his art in New York City by 1932, and by 1957, he had organized more than 22 solo shows. His paintings have been included in exhibitions of Carnegie Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, Corcoran Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of Art, New Haven Art Festival and the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo. In 1949, in New Canaan, Connecticut, at the Silvermine Guild of Artists, Arthur and Miriam Broudy co-founded the New England and National Print Show which has long been regarded as one of the top art contests in the country. Arthur also founded the Chautauqua Art Centre in 1956; it is now known as the Chautauqua Art Association Gallery that is now called the Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art. From 1956 until his passing in 1986, Arthur served as the director of the Chautauqua Art Summer School in Chautauqua, New York, where he frequently lectured and supervised seminars in painting and drawing. Additionally, he instructed art appreciation classes at New York University. Psychiatrist Karl Menninger, Joan Seiler, Clifford Davis, Vadim Filimonov, Thorton W. Whipple, Herb Jackson, Anthony H. Horan, and others were among his students. In his honor, the “Revington Arthur Award for Excellence in Painting” is now given to artists all around the world. The Guggenheim Museum, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, and other museums have collections of Arthur’s art.

AMERICAN
LIFESTYLE
in its
rawest
form

Geometrical
Abstraction

By the early 1950s, Arthur’s art significantly shifted away from its earlier reliance on more conventional themes and became considerably more abstract, and with many works being influenced by space exploration, modern technology, and the Cold War. He created compositions that were somewhat independent from outside visual sources by using the visual language of shape, form, color, and line. The varied sources from which the artist had derived his theoretical ideas reflected the social and intellectual concerns that dominated many facets of American culture in that period of time. Throughout the time, he developed his visual language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms illustrated in non illusionistic space and combined into non objective compositions. In order to show the subject in a wider context, the artist opposed different subjects from different worlds, sometimes also referring to Italian Renaissance masters. He created paintings that were emotional responses to and interpretations of his experience by using mostly primary, intense colors.