Lot 22: Paul Feeley (American, 1910-1966) Blue on Yellow, 1958

Paul Feeley (American, 1910-1966)
Blue on Yellow, 1958 oil on canvas 45 9/16 x 66 1/8 in. 115.7 x 168 cm. This work was executed in 1958.

Provenance: Private Collection, Vermont (acquired directly from the artist) Thence by descent to the present ownerPaul Feeley was a quintessential "artist's artist"—his work defied easy classification, and he considered the intellectual growth of his students a measure of his own success. Feeley devoted his career to teaching, beginning at The Cooper Union School of Art at the age of 25 and culminating at Bennington College where he taught for over two decades. Feeley's legacy at Bennington cannot be underestimated—between 1939 and 1966, a seminal period for what became known as the Abstract Expressionist and Color Field movements—Feeley brought the avant-garde to Bennington, and Bennington to New York. Along with Clement Greenberg, he organized the first retrospective of exhibitions of Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann and David Smith at Bennington in the early 1950s, and conversely, organized a show of Bennington students at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1950. This established Bennington as a major center for artistic production on the East coast, paving the way for his most illustrious student Helen Frankenthaler. Feeley's own body of work has been reassessed with fresh eyes in recent years, freed from the shadow of his own academic career and the dominant Abstract Expressionist ethos of the period. He had, in fact, had been active on the New York gallery circuit before his untimely passing in 1966, and ripe for rediscovery. Feeley exhibited while at Bennington, beginning in 1954 with his first group show at the Kootz Gallery, New York. Subsequently, he held a solo exhibition at Tibor De Nagy Gallery in 1955, a group show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1959, a group show at Kasmin Gallery, London, in 1964, and two solo exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1960 and 1965, respectively. Feeley's work occupies a unique space between the bravado of gestural abstraction and the cold rigor of "hard-edge" painting, informed by both intuition and intellect. Gene Baro, curator and late Bennington colleague of the artist, describes 1953-1954 as a "breakthrough" year for Feeley where he gained "self-acceptance" and "the direction he took owed more to how he felt than to any overt strategy in relation to the then-current scene in avant garde American Painting" (Paul Feeley (1910-1966): A Memorial Exhibition, New York 1968, p. 13.) Once he began to "base his art upon the dictates of his own temperament", a quieter, restrained and meditative form of gestural abstraction emerged—one that eschewed "art as performance" and moved toward "decorum and formality" (Ibid, p. 15). Feeley "began to center the image" to an essential form and "suppress painterly incident" (Ibid, p. 13). Speaking to critic, curator and friend Lawrence Alloway in 1964, Feeley described this epiphany through the example of Red Blotch, 1954: "...All that time...spent in breaking up space in exciting and dynamic ways turned me toward a conception of movement which was almost the contradiction of what you might call the dynamic and the exciting...I just sensed the shape of the canvas as an event, as against the notion of the canvas creating an arena for events...It struck me increasingly that the things I couldn't forget in art, in connection with movement, were things more like pyramids...and Egyptian sculpture, and all sorts of early forms that got all of their life...through something that just sat still and had a presence rather than some sort of an agitated fit" (Ibid, p. 17).Blue On Yellow is an superlative example of the artist's mature period that is organic, nuanced, and elegant, exhibiting a primacy of form with simplified colors inspired by the Mediterranean light. Feeley was inspired by Mediterranean culture, and in the two years preceding the present work, he lived in Malaga in southern Spain (Ibid, p. 11). The two-toned palette is a hallmark of his late 1950s works where "two planes vie for perceptual dominance, each attempting to push the other back into relative space" (Douglas Dreischpoon, Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954-1966, New York 2015, p. 43). The serene and reductive forms shown exemplify his "unique resolution of the figure-ground problem, a stillness absolutely in accord with his expressive aims" (Ibid, p. 18). Like the Abstract Expressionists of the period, Feeley rejected the "privileged" orientation and mode of production of easel painting, preferring to work on canvas on the floor, unstretched, with enamel house paint (Ibid, p. 42). He "bought industrial color to save money...He continued this habit because it freed him from the fashionable hues and values which establish that contemporary look, a quality particularly evident since the marketing of acrylic art colors" (Eugene Goossen, 'Paul Feeley' in Art International, December 1964, p. 31). Feeley chose not to prime his canvases, such as in the present work, lending an honesty and directness to his form of expression. He used thinned paint with enough body to coalesce on the surface, reinforcing the form's physicality.Coming to market for the very first time, the painting has been in the same private New England collection since its creation. Recently, Feeley was the subject of a career retrospective at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo and the Columbus Museum of Art. His works reside in the permanent collection of esteemed museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.