Press Release

Spanierman Gallery, LLC at East Hampton is pleased to announce the opening on October 11, 2007 of Gertrude Greene: Abstract Paintings, Collages, Drawings, and Sculpture (1930-56). Although known primarily for her role as a pioneering figure in the development of American geometric abstraction, Gertrude Greene was an artist of great versatility, whose work spanned many of the modern movements of her era. Her willingness to absorb and combine seemingly disparate modes is demonstrated in early paintings, collages, drawings, and sculpture that are reflective of the influences of Piet Mondrian, Constructivism, biomorphism, and Surrealism, as well as in later “palette-knife” works in which she converged architectonic form with the gestural methods of Abstract Expressionism. From 1948 until her death in 1956, Greene and her husband Balcomb lived in the large home they built in Montauk Point, Long Island.

A native of Brooklyn, Gertrude Greene, née Glass, studied sculpture at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in Manhattan from 1924 until 1926. In 1926 she married the painter Balcomb Greene. For the next five years the couple divided their time between New York, Vienna, and Paris, familiarizing themselves with the latest currents in modern art. The Greenes returned to New York permanently in 1931. In the years ahead, Gertrude developed a reputation as a leading proponent of non-objective art. In addition to producing free-standing sculpture and constructivist-inspired wood reliefs, she began to excute collages, often combining both organic and geometric forms. Toward the end of the 1930s, influenced in particular by the work of Naum Gabo and Mondrian, her work assumed an even greater degree of abstraction.

Greene was one of several vanguard artists, among them Alice Trumbull Mason, Ilya Bolotowsky and Rosalind Bengelsdorf, who founded the American Abstract Artists group in 1936. A year later, her wood relief Composition (1937; Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts) was purchased by Albert Gallatin for his Museum of Living Art, in New York, the first of her works to enter a public collection. In 1939 she designed a wall relief for the WNYC Municipal Building in New York, working under Burgoyne Diller, who headed the Mural division.

During her later years, Greene came under the influence of Abstract Expressionist painting. Using a palette knife, she created richly textured, sensuously colored surfaces in which the evidence of the pictorial structure creates an underlying tension. Greene died at the young age of fifty-two; her husband outlived her by thirty-four years.

In conjunction with the growing interest in American abstract art of the 1930s, Greene's work has received significant attention from scholars and critics in recent decades. She was also included in the exhibitions: Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927-1944 (1983, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh), The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction, 1930-1945 (1989, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., now Smithsonian American Art Museum); and an exhibition along with Balcomb, held at the Terra Foundation of American Art (1998, Giverny, France). Examples of Gertrude Greene’s work can be found in major public and private collections throughout the United States, most notably the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Telfair Academy, Savannah Georgia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.