John Little Color Form
Untitled, 1973 Egg tempera on canvas, 40 x 48 inches Signed lower left and signed verso Cover/back cover: Sinhala, 1970 Tempera on canvas, 56 x 60 inches Signed lower left
John Little Color Form October 1–31, 2020
Opening Reception Tuesday, October 6, 6 – 9 pm Masks and distancing required Limited guests in gallery at one time
Ally Village 200 Spring Park Drive, Suite 105 Midland, Texas 79705 info@bakerschorrfineart.com bakerschorrfineart.com 432.687.1268
Drums, 1975 Oil on canvas, 38 x 76 inches Signed and dated lower left
“Space, color and form…they work together through color tensions to create the magical unity, the work of art. “
– John Little
John Little was born in 1907 in Alabama. He attended the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy from 1924 to 1927, and in 1933 studied under George Grosz at the Art Students League. In 1937 he began working with Hans Hofmann in both New York and Provincetown, which pushed him towards abstraction and his first serious involvement as a painter. At Hofmann’s school he met artists such as Lee Krasner, George McNeil, Gerome Kamrowski, Giorgio Cavallon and Perle Fine. Hans Hofmann’s “Push Pull” theory, methodology and use of color was what Little was looking for to understand that three-dimensional nature is translated into two-dimensional paintings by means of tension between, space, form and color. In 1946 Little’s series of colorful paintings of interlocking forms in cubist-inspired compositions with mythical titles were submitted on to a group show in San Francisco at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which resulted in an invitation to his first solo exhibition, opening there in November 1946. The late 1940s was a time of change for Little. He regularly visited Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner in East Hampton. The Hamptons were becoming an outpost for New York’s avantgarde such as Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner, Mary Abbott, Alfonso Ossorio, Perle Fine, David Budd, David Slivka, Esteban Vicente, Wilfred Zogbaum, Robert Motherwell, Norman Bluhm, Franz Kline, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Robert Richenburg, Grace Hartigan, Adolf Gottlieb and Michael Goldberg among others. In 1951 Little and his wife moved to East Hampton, where he renovated an old house and barn for his studio. He maintained a close friendship with Jackson Pollock - the two had a joint exhibition in 1955 at Guild Hall. Little’s work began to shift toward confident gestural abstraction in the early 1950s. He states, “I was trying to get away from the drawing, letting form and color carry the idea rather than the line”. He began a series of collage works on paper at this time. Some were spare and simple and others were a riot of materials and color. Little’s starting point was often a page from the New York Times on to which he applied layers of painted and torn paper, oil paint and whatever else was close at hand. In 1957 Little helped found the Signa Gallery, an important outpost in East Hampton for the growing New York art scene and host to many influential exhibitions. He had solo exhibitions at, among others, Betty Parsons Gallery, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, Worth Ryder Gallery, and A.M. Sachs Gallery. His work is part of the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guild Hall Museum, Ball State University Museum of Art and Galerie Beyeler among others. In 1982, Little was honored with a retrospective at Guild Hall in East Hampton. He remained active until his death in 1984.
Top: Photo by Abby Tooker, 1970
62-2, 1962 Oil on canvas, 77 x 47 1/2 inches Signed, dated 1962 and titled verso
Blue Highway, 1971 Acrylic on paper collage on Masonite, 24 x 20 inches Signed and dated lower left
Color Zones, 1982 Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 50 1/4 inches Signed lower left
Untitled Acrylic on paper laid on canvas, 30 x 40 1/4 inches Signed and titled verso