NEW YORK, NY.- Peter Freeman, Inc. announced the representation of the Estate of Myron Stout and will present their inaugural exhibition of the artist's work with a selection of charcoal drawings from his personal collection that have never been shown before.
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Myron Stout (b. 1905, Denton, Texas; d. 1987, Chatham, Massachusetts) was one of the most respected abstract artists of his generation, though he famously exhibited a limited body of work. While studying under Hans Hofmann at his studio-school in New York, Stout developed his distinctive spare, exacting style that bridged abstract expressionism to an anticipation of minimalism while existing outside of both. Working within the traditions of Constantin Brancusi or Piet Mondrian, Myron Stout found meaning within a simplified vocabulary. His first mature works were colorful depictions of geometric, almost neoplastic patterns, yet he found his stride in the black-and-white compositions that he said came out of his interest in the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Best known for his final series of biomorphic oil paintings, Stout also produced works in charcoal and graphite. He had a slow, almost agonizing practice that strove for perfection with imperfect mediums, often working on individual drawings and paintings for decades.
“As long as they were not concluded I kept them, because I knew there was something in there that was most probably a potential for solution, for bringing it to completion.” – Myron Stout
The process of development mattered as much to Myron Stout as completion, if not more, and he almost never discarded a work once it was started. In this exhibition a group of more than 30 charcoals from the late 1940s and early 1950s charts the development of Stout’s imagery from his figural studies at Hans Hofmann’s studio-school to the highly reduced, hard-edged abstractions he is known for. Many of the drawings straddle the line between representation and abstraction, seemingly transforming from figurative to abstract even within the same composition.
Although Stout only participated in a handful of exhibitions during his career, his 1980 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York solidified him as a key figure in the history of abstract art. He was also the subject of a retrospective at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (1977) and has had solo shows at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, United Kingdom (1998) and Dia Art Foundation, Bridgehampton, New York (1990). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and the Merit Medal for Painting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
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