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FERREN John; born 1905 in Pendleton, Oregon - 1970. American painter. |
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| His early childhood was spent moving
from place to place in the Pacific Northwest, and his adolescent years
in San Francisco and Los Angeles. |
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| 1925 | Abandoning an early inclination
toward engineering, he took up sculpture in 1925 as both vocation and
avocation. A brief encounter with art classes resulted in
disenchantment that led him to an apprenticeship with an Italian
stonecutter in San Francisco where he made decorative objects in
plaster and stone. |
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| 1925-30 | Traveled frequently
in the U.S. and abroad. |
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| 1931 | Finally moving to Paris, then the center of
modern art, in 1931. (Biographical information in Who's Who in American Art, 1970, lists Ferren's study at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Florence, Italy and the University Salmaca, Spain, though dates are not provided.) |
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| After his
first trip to Europe, he abandoned sculpture as an artistic means,
despite his long apprenticeship. According to biographer Craig Bailey,
". . . a visit to a Matisse exhibition in Munich particularly
stirred his desire to work in color; and color was to become his great
strength." 1* For the following eight years, Ferren remained in Paris developing a mature painting style. Soon after moving to Paris, he married the daughter of a Spanish artist and through his father-in-law, met many of the group of international artists living in Paris. Bailey writes that Ferren became quite close to Picasso, though he tried to avoid Picasso's influence in his work. |
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| 1938 | Following the trauma of his divorce
and impending war in Europe, Ferren returned to the United States.
After the war, during which he served with the Office of War
Information in North Africa, England and France, Ferren settled in New
York. He became associated with a group of ambitious abstract artists
and developed a unique Abstract Expressionistic style in his painting. |
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| 1950s |
During the 1950s, figurative elements became more apparent in his work. |
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| 1960s | By the 1960s he had begun to reinvestigate his earlier,
Abstract Expressionist
technique.
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| The last phase of Ferren's work
displayed a return to the concerns of forty years earlier when he
utilized flat, unbroken ground planes, chromatic scales, geometric
simplicity, and sharply defined contours.
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| Bailey writes: | |||
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"Constantly reviewing his artistic vocabulary, he never relied
on a style long enough to become stereotyped; a restiveness emerging
from his commitment to intuition and spontaneity as a source of
knowledge. That intuition, combined with Ferren's considerable
aesthetic sophistication, produced extraordinarily beautiful
innovations."
2*
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| Further insight is provided by Dore Ashton: | |||
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"There were a few cosmopolitan spirits who added a touch of
sophistication to the New York School dialogues. One of the most
eloquent was John Ferren. Urbane and seemingly imperturbable . . .
other artists looked to him for clarification of issues, and many
admired his intellectual independence." 3*
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| and H. H. Arnason: | |||
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"Unlike many of the painters who subsequently became leaders of
the Abstract Expressionist movement in American painting, John
Ferren never passed through a stage of social realism, regionalism
or other form of literal representation. Almost from the beginning
of his career, he was associated with abstraction and in the
thirties had already established an international reputation as a
geometric abstractionist." 4*
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References:
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