John Havens Thornton (1933 - 2021)
John Havens Thornton (1933 - 2021)
John Havens Thornton was born in Mexico City to American parents on December 20th, 1933. Growing up in Upper Montclair, NJ, Thornton’s pursuit of art-making stemmed from childhood. In conversation with a correspondent for The Torch, UMass Dartmouth’s student newspaper, Thornton spoke of the formative influence his mother, and an artist herself, who sparked his creative journey: she displayed the artwork that she had collected around the family home and Thornton recalled being particular taken with her book reproductions of the work of Henri Matisse.
1967 Whitney Museum (Biennial Catalog). Left: John Havens Thornton “Tree”. Right: Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976)
Dorothy Thornton attended the Pratt Institute, earned her bachelor’s and master’s fine art degree from New York University, and was friends with Alfred H. Barr Jr, the inaugural director of MoMA. She was an active member of the education board of New York and directed its museum program for young students: “The city [New York] had buses that they rented, and school kids would get on the buses and they’d get tours of the metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim Museum. So, I have a long history of loving painting.” [1]
While pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering at Princeton University, Thornton began publishing cartoon illustrations in student publications. Alongside classmate Frank Stella (1936 – 2024), it was at Princeton that a young Thornton first studied painting under William C. Seitz (1914 - 1974) who was the first person to be awarded a PhD in contemporary art by the university. In both his scholarly pursuits and own artistic practice, Seitz was a staunch champion of Abstract Expressionism which would inform Thornton’s early development as a painter.
'Untitled (Abstract Landscape).' Circa 1970s. Oil on canvas. 24 x 28".
After graduation in 1955, Thornton relocated to New York and began working as an industrial designer for Henry Dreyfuss Associates and General Electric. He continued his artistic training in 1957 at the Arts Student League with the abstract painter Ralston Crawford (1906 – 1978) a leading proponent of the Precisionist art movement in the US during the 1920s and 30s. His chosen place of study, the Arts Students League in New York was one of the chief training grounds for the early-career Abstract Expressionists whose work Thornton admired. In 1958, he progressed to the National Academy of Design and trained under Robert Phillip (1895 – 1981) an artist who is sometimes labelled as “America’s last Impressionist”.
'Untitled (Color Grid).' Oil on canvas. Signed on verso. 18 x 22".
Thornton secured himself a studio space on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue in close proximity to the important midtown galleries. Thornton fully digested the examples of the New York School in particular the “European émigré Arshile Gorky, and others of the movement’s acknowledged leaders, such as Willem de Kooning and later Phillip Guston” according to the art historian David B. Boyce (1949 - 2014). In 1961, Thornton exhibited his first abstract works at the Nordness Gallery in New York.[2]
'Untitled (Ribbons).' Oil on canvas. 20x24".
Thornton and his young family moved to Boston in 1962. He took up a teaching position giving lessons in studio practice and the philosophy of art at the Massachusetts College of Art where he remained for two decades. He also worked as a set designer for the Theater [3]Company of Boston which was co-founded by the actress Naomi Thornton (1935 – 2020) with the stage director David Wheeler in 1963.
Thornton devoted himself to his professional career as an artist while living in Boston. Abandoning the fluid expressionist mode and dense gestural compositions of his New York years, he began developing his signature brand of abstraction in the early 1960s. Thornton restricted his brush to polychromatic linear explorations of form against neutral-colored grounds. While minimalism is the catch-all operative word to characterize his work of this period, Thornton stood out from his contemporaries. Compared to monochrome minimal art that was being exhibited in New York at the time, Thornton affirmed the primacy of color which was more closely associated with the 'hard-edge' school of abstract painting of Frank Stella. At the same time, Thornton still preserved his abstract expressionist heritage through a vocabulary of curvilinear forms at odds with the vogue for geometric abstraction. Thornton’s abstract creations of the 1960s were equally referential and imbued with a personal nature that was defiant of the impersonality of more sterile and modular-based minimalist practices. His works retain the essence of their maker whose brushstroke dignifies each subject with suggestively figurative titles (shoes, tree, tower, house) which connect them to our perceptions.
Untitled. 1967. Oil on board. Signed and dated on verso. 24 x 21"; 25.5 x 22.5" (framed).
The art historian and former chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, Roger Mandle (1941 – 2020) has summarized Thornton’s mature style: "John Thornton’s reductive paintings from the 1960’s are rich with ambiguities of space and color. Thornton explains these works as searching for the meaning of line as an edge or a direction that attempts to describe a spatial event. These paintings are his intuitive exercises in which lines paradoxically “undefine space” through his exquisitely lean color palette and simplified forms. […] By the use of subtle transitions of color within these lines, he flattens the forms to abstractions that become cyphers for themselves. Thus the lines defy or “ruin” space and form so that we must confront his paintings as abstract exercises of great beauty and pleasure."[4]
'Vinnie's Ball #15.' Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on verso. 18 x 24".
Thornton began exhibiting his abstract paintings in and around Boston and was granted several solo shows in prominent galleries such as Ward-Nasse Gallery. He participated in a group exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and was selected for a two-man show with the artist Richard Hamilton (1917 – 2004) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 1967, Thornton was invited to submit a work for the “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. For the event, which would later become the Whitney Biennial beginning in 1973, he lent his polychromatic Tree from 1966. The list of artists who exhibited at the Whitney show reads a veritable Who's Who in American Art. His painting hung on the wall alongside his Abstract Expressionist mentors such as Willem de Kooning and his vanguard Pop Art contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein (1923 -1997), James Rosenquist (1933 – 2017) and Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987).
"Two Figures" Oil on canvas. 24 1/4 x 28 1/4".
Thornton gradually introduced more and more pictorial elements into his abstract paintings which first led to explorations of the human figure where irregular oval forms sparsely delineated mouths, eyes, heads and shoes. In 1973, he produced the first of his so-called “grid paintings” which the artist would return to again and again throughout his career. Although still grounded in the primacy of the line, the seriality of and uniformity of the grid format brought Thornton’s closer to his ‘hard edge’ abstract contemporaries. Marking a radical departure from his earlier fluid compositions, Thornton’s newfound pictorial discipline now involved “mathematical precision” to organize his canvases. [5]Don Wilkinson, writing for the Standard-Times, once questioned Thornton about what influence op-art held on his grid paintings to which his response was: “It’s all op-art.”[6] Brick fields of color freely hover over carefully over Thornton’s delineated geometric webs. Like his reductive cipher forms from the 1960s, he continued to ascribe lyrical titles to his grid works anchoring them in reality as abstracted landscapes, bodies of water and other natural phenomena. Later in the 2000s, Thornton would revisit the subject and completely deconstruct the components of his early grids as demonstrated in the Constellation series.
'Untitled.' 2007. Oil on canvas. Signed, and dated on verso. 18 x 24".
Over the course of the 1970s, Thornton was granted one-man shows at The School of Art at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, the Hildreth Gallery at Nasson College, the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. In 1984, Thornton settled in New Bedford, MA with his wife Pat Coomey Thornton, a fellow painter and textile artist. In the 1980s, Thornton turned to linear perspective and three-dimensional space for the first time. Through a series of untraditional still life pictures, he arranged colorful boxes, balls, doors, stairways and architectural building blocks in lifeless landscapes that almost recall the sense of the uncanny of a Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) painting. Thornton continued to enjoy critical success with solo exhibitions at the Clark Gallery, Lincoln, MA, and Dartmouth Gallery, Dartmouth, MA.
'Untitled'. 2011. Oil on canvas. Signed and dated on verso. 20 x 16".
In 2004, Thornton was honored with a retrospective exhibition in his adopted hometown at the New Bedford Art Museum for his “investment in [the] community” and the South Coast Massachusetts cultural scene[7]. In 2015 Thornton returned to New York City to exhibit at the Bienvenu Steinberg & J Gallery. The show's curator, Roger Mandle, critically reappraised Thornton’s abstract body of work from the 1960s. Curated by Gregory de la Haba, a retrospective was held in the same year at the Amstel Gallery in New York surveying the artists fifty-year-long career.
John Havens Thornton passed away on April 16th, 2021. His work has been acquired by the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover[8], the Rose Art Museum and prominent private collections.
The Addison Gallery of American Art. Acrylic on wove paper. Permanent Collection.
[1] David B. Boyce, ‘Painting A Life’, John Thornton Paintings: A Retrospective (New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Art Museum, 2004).
[2] The Nordness Gallery “promoted a roster of contemporary painters and sculptors, including David Aronson, Al Blaustein, Alberto Collie, Ralston Crawford, Robert D'Arista, Kahlil Gibran, Ruth Gikow, Peter Grippe, Milton Hebald, Zubel Kachadoorian, James Kearns, Julian Levi, Walter Meigs, Gregorio Prestopino, Hiram Williams, Karl Zerbe”. [Archives of American Art, Smithsonian website]
[3] Actors such as Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro were players in the company.
[4] Roger Mandle, 2015 (Bienvenu Steinberg & J)
[5] Qtd. Scott Lariviere, “John Havens Thornton: New Bedford Artist at Star Store Gallery” (see above)
[6] Don Wilkinson, “Thornton, Steger rejoice in color, shapes and composition”, Standard-Times (Sep 15, 2016)
[7] Karie C. Vincent, ‘Foreword’, John Thornton Paintings: A Retrospective (New Bedford, MA: New Bedford Art Museum, 2004).
[8] Addison Gallery Collections.