Balcomb Greene

Artists frequently supplement their income by teaching—a practice that dates back centuries. Their classes are usually in studio art and sometimes other subjects such as art history. In this respect, Balcomb Greene (1904–1990) is exceptional as a painter who was also an instructor of English literature and art history.

Born John Wesley Greene in Millville, a hamlet in northwestern New York, the artist was the son of a Methodist minister. He spent his childhood years in various locales in Iowa, South Dakota, and Colorado. Initially he planned to follow in his father’s footsteps, and, with this in mind, he graduated from Syracuse University in 1926 with a degree in philosophy. After some post-graduate study in psychology in Vienna, he moved to New York City, where he earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University. The title of his thesis was The Fallen Woman in Seventeenth-Century English Literature. Between 1928 and 1931 he taught English at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The year 1931 was pivotal; Greene and his wife Gertrude Glass, a sculptor, went to Paris to learn more about avant-garde art and literature. Originally intending to write novels, he soon decided to devote himself to painting. He studied independently at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and familiarized himself with Cubism and the abstract work of Piet Mondrian and Juan Gris. His flat and hard-edged paintings from this period reflect these influences. In 1936, he became a founding member and first chairman of American Abstract Artists, an organization formed to promote abstract art. From 1936 to 1939 he worked for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration and undertook a ninety-foot mural now at the Brooklyn Museum for the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, housing project. Another mural was featured in the Hall of Medicine at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.

Greene’s interests shifted again in 1940, when he began to study art history at New York University. He abandoned his crisp, brightly colored geometric paintings in favor of figurative work, mostly nudes, handled with expressive brushwork. Greene completed his master’s degree in 1943, with a thesis entitled, Mechanistic Tendencies in Painting, 1901–1908 and taught art history at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh from 1942 to 1959. Throughout this period he was a prolific journalist, writing articles for Art News and College Art Journal, with titles like “The Artist’s Reluctance to Communicate” and “Basic Concepts for Teaching Art.”

Beginning in the late 1940s, Greene spent long periods of time at his home in Montauk on the eastern end of Long Island. His imagery, reflecting this location, shifted to the sea, rendered in cool grays, blues, and white. Although Greene moved away from pure abstraction, his paintings retained an abstract quality. Writing in 1957 at the height of Abstract Expressionism, he addressed the equivocation of modern art: “Yet we see the traditionalist, the avant-garde artist, he who designs useful objects and he who seeks more intangible effects, are victimized as much by fashion and by intolerance mixed with indecision as was ever true in the history of art. It is doubtful our generation, confused by the scheme of values which pervades society, has more ability to single out works of lasting value than have those generations whose judgments we now condemn.” [1]

Notes:

[1] Greene, “The Artist’s Reluctance to Communicate,” Art News, January 1957, 44.