Robert Swain (artist)

Last updated
Robert Swain Robertswainatstudio.jpg
Robert Swain

Robert Swain (born December 7, 1940) [2] is an American artist working in the field of Color Sensation. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Robert Swain was born on December 7, 1940 in Austin, Texas and grew up in Arlington, Virginia. [4] As a teenager he was influenced by the art in the Washington, D.C. National Gallery of Art, specifically Raphael, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. [5] From 1956-57 Swain traveled and worked in Central American on the Pan-American Highway, and from 1961-62 he lived and studied at the University of Madrid, Spain as part of his undergraduate studies. [4]

In 1964 Swain received his BA degree from the American University in Washington, D.C. [4]

Career

Living and working in New York City Swain is a longtime member of the “Hunter Color School”, along with Doug Ohson, Gabriele Evertz, Vincent Longo, Joanna Pousette-Dart, and Sanford Wurmfeld. [6]

Swain is the recipient of a grant for painting from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1969, a CAPS Grant (painting), from the State of New York, in 1982, and two Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (painting); the first in 1976, and again in 1989. [7] Teaching at Hunter College from 1968-2014 Swain was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Art Award from the College Art Association in February 1998. [8] He has given numerous Visiting Artist lectures, served on various Fine Art Juries and participated in many panel discussions, such as the Artist’s Panel at The Museum of Modern Art, entitled Tony Smith: Artists’ Responses (1998) and, Seeing Red, Part III: Color as an Experience: A Two- Day Symposium on Contemporary Nonobjective Painting and Color Theory, at the Goethe–Institute Inter Nationes, New York (2003). [7]

Major exhibitions

Swain's work has been included in group shows at The Museum of Modern Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [9] In 2010 a major exhibition of his work, entitled Visual Sensations, The Paintings of Robert Swain: 1967 – 2010, was held at the Hunter College / Times Square Gallery, curated by Gabriele Evertz. [7]

Public collections

Swain's artwork is represented The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Walker Art Center, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Denver Art Museum, The Milwaukee Art Center, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Everson Art Museum, The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [7] [10] 2012

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Bierstadt</span> German-American landscape painter (1830–1902)

Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Rauschenberg</span> American painter and graphic artist (1925–2008)

Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artworks which incorporated everyday objects as art materials and which blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking and performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Josef Albers</span> German-American graphic designer

Josef Albers was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hudson River School</span> American art movement

The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. The paintings typically depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Truitt</span> American sculptor (1921–2004)

Anne Truitt, born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lois Mailou Jones</span> American artist (1905-1998)

Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was an artist and educator. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. She is often associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy DeCarava</span> American photographer (1919–2009)

Roy Rudolph DeCarava was an American artist. DeCarava received early critical acclaim for his photography, initially engaging and imaging the lives of African Americans and jazz musicians in the communities where he lived and worked. Over a career that spanned nearly six decades, DeCarava came to be known as a founder in the field of black and white fine art photography, advocating for an approach to the medium based on the core value of an individual, subjective creative sensibility, which was separate and distinct from the "social documentary" style of many predecessors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Corcoran School of the Arts and Design</span>

The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design is the professional art school of the George Washington University, in Washington, DC. Founded in 1878, the school is housed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the oldest private cultural institution in Washington, located on The Ellipse, facing the White House. The Corcoran School is part of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and was formerly an independent college, until 2014.

Sherrie Levine is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Gilliam</span> American painter (1933–2022)

Sam Gilliam was an American color field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. Gilliam was associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington, D.C.-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s. His works have also been described as belonging to abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction. He worked on stretched, draped and wrapped canvas, and added sculptural 3D elements. He was recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars around 1965. This was a major contribution to the Color Field School and has had a lasting impact on the contemporary art canon. Arne Glimcher, Gilliam's art dealer at Pace Gallery, wrote following his death that "His experiments with color and surface are right up there with the achievements of Rothko and Pollock."

The Washington Color School, also known as the Washington, D.C., Color School, was an art movement starting during the 1950s–1970s in Washington, D.C., in the United States, built of abstract expressionist artists. The movement emerged during a time when society, the arts, and people were changing quickly. The founders of this movement are Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, however four more artists were part of the initial art exhibition in 1965.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronnie Landfield</span> American painter

Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Wood (artist)</span>

Brian Wood is a visual artist working in painting, drawing and printmaking and formerly with photography and film in upstate New York and New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pat Steir</span> American painter and printmaker (born 1940)

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.

Minus Space is an art gallery located in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY. It specializes in abstract art and reductive art.

Benjamin Abramowitz was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. First recognized for his contribution at age 19 as senior artist with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in New York City, he is among the most respected Washington, D.C., artists of the past century.

Gabriele Evertz is an American painter, curator and professor who is applying the history and theory of color in her work. She is known for abstract color painting and Geometric abstraction.

George Peck is a New York-based visual artist. Born in Hungary, his work has appeared in exhibitions across the United States and Europe, and his work is represented in such museums as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, Kiscelli Museum in Budapest, and Museum of Modern Art in Sweden.

Frances Barth is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works. She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s minimalism and conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor. Critic Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth’s paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness … [she] questions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."

James Little is an American painter and curator. He is known for his works of geometric abstraction which are often imbued with exuberant color. He has been based in New York City.

References

  1. "Chronology". robertswainnyc.com. Retrieved 2018-03-30.
  2. "ROBERT SWAIN Color Energy". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  3. Mizota, Sharon. "Robert Swain presents color as a transfer of energy". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  4. 1 2 3 "Robert Swain - Artist Biography for Robert Swain". www.askart.com. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  5. "William Agee:Color as Content: Robert Swain and American Art". robertswainnyc.com. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  6. "Slippery Geometry and Beguiling Color". Hyperallergic. 2017-08-12. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  7. 1 2 3 4 ManagedArtwork.com. "David Richard Gallery - Robert Swain". www.davidrichardgallery.com. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  8. Association, College Art. "Awards for Distinction | Programs | CAA". www.collegeart.org. Retrieved 2018-03-23.
  9. "Art in Embassies: Robert Swain: Vita". US-Department of state. Retrieved 2022-04-30.
  10. "Robert Swain: Untitled, 2012". Metropolitan Museum of Art . Retrieved 2022-04-30.
  11. Agee, William C. (2016). Modern Art In America 1908-68. London: Phaidon Press Limited. pp. 319–322. ISBN   9780714869346.