Stephen Greene Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1917 - d. 1999

Stephen Greene (September 19, 1917 – November 18, 1999) was an American artist known for his abstract paintings and in the 1940s his social realist figure paintings.

Stephen Greene was born in New York City. He attended the National Academy School of Art and then the Art Students League, and earned a BFA and a MA at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He studied with Philip Guston, and they remained friends until Guston's death in 1980.[1]

Greene taught at Princeton University for many years where he was teacher to many well-known figures in the art world including Frank Stella and art critic and historian Michael Fried. Greene had more than two dozen solo exhibitions of his work in leading art galleries in New York City. He also taught at the Art Students League of New York for several decades. After the mid-1950s and until his death Greene's mature work was related to abstract expressionism, color field painting and surrealism. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.

He died aged 82 in November 1999 at his home in Valley Cottage, New York, where he had lived for more than 40 years with his wife the novelist Sigrid de Lima (1921–1999), who died two months earlier. Their daughter, Alison de Lima Greene, is a curator at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and has published a number of works on modern art.