Peyton Wright is pleased to announce Idioms, the Gallery’s premiere exhibition of paintings by Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974). Over the course of a long career in the arts, Shaw was a vocal and prolific proponent of American abstract painting, and according to New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, “a peripatetic, multitasking insider-outsider who pledged allegiance to Modernism but also played the field.”
Shaw graduated from Yale in 1914 and completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University. A native of New York City, Shaw initially worked as a journalist for publications like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair; it wasn’t until an extended stay in Europe in the 1920s, when he was exposed to the work of Arp, Braque, Picasso, and others, that he decided to devote his energies exclusively to painting.
When he returned to New York, Shaw aspired to paint works informed by this distinctively European, modernist sensibility, and he dubbed the semi-cubist compositions he made during this period, based on New York City architecture, “plastic polygons.” Shaw’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Valentine Gallery in 1934, and in 1935, Albert Gallatin organized a show of his paintings at the Gallery of Living Art. In 1936, along with Josef Albers and others, Shaw founded the American Abstract Artist Association in New York City, a group that paved the way for Abstract Expressionism and included Louise Bourgeois, Piet Mondrian, and Ad Reinhardt, among many others.
Idioms consists primarily of paintings from the 1960s and 1970s. Reductive and bold, they reference Shaw’s hard-edged style of the 1930s while incorporating aspects of 1960s Minimalism. The works included employ a closely unified palette—oftentimes just two or three colors; in many, areas of subtle texture engage the viewer and heighten compositional contrast. Circular shapes and motifs are repeated across many of the canvases, and polygons also dominate; rendered in jagged or spoked iterations they inject a singularly deliberate dynamism.
The work of Charles Green Shaw is featured in the collections of major American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and many others.
View CatalogueAbout the Artist
- Charles Green Shaw
Charles Green Shaw was born in 1892 to a wealthy New York family. He lost both his parents at a very young age (his mother died when he was just three years old). Despite the early loss of his parents, Shaw lived the whimsical life of a New York socialite. As a beneficiary to an inheritance based in part upon the Woolworth fortune, he was brought up surrounded by the well-bred, well-groomed and well-moneyed citizens of New York’s elite social class. His social status as an adolescent was cultivated while spending summers in Newport and attending Christmas balls at Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt’s. At age six, Shaw began to take an interest in drawing, and by nine, he was known to have a fondness for sketching historical costumes.
After graduating from Yale University in 1914, Shaw spent a year studying at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Subsequently he served for eighteen months as a lieutenant in World War I. After his service, Shaw returned to New York and tried his hand as a businessman selling real estate, but his attempt was short-lived.
In the early 1920s, Shaw began his career as a journalist and novelist. He achieved professional success, writing for magazines such as The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Smart Set. Shaw’s writing was a record of his approvals and disapprovals of the social crowd to which he belonged. His profession, along with his social pedigree, brought him in contact with a number of the most significant figures of the 1920s such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, George Gershwin, George Jean Nathan and the American artist George Luks. Some of his profiles included celebrity caricatures used as illustrations; these were the public's first look at Shaw’s artistic ability. In 1928, a collection of Shaw’s articles and interviews were published in one volume titled "The Low Down."
Just previous to the stock market crash and the end of the Jazz Age, Shaw left New York and traveled to Paris and London. He arrived in Paris in 1929. In an autobiographical note Shaw suggests it was on this trip when he first began to paint seriously. London also acted as a great source of motivation for the budding artist. He began to sketch everyday in St. James’s Park, making large pastels of its vistas in the style of Cezanne. When he returned to New York in 1932, Shaw considered himself a painter.
Success for Shaw came quickly with his first solo exhibition mounted at the Valentine Gallery in 1934. The following year Albert Eugene Gallatin included works by the artist in an unprecedented solo exhibition at his Gallery of Living Art at New York University. Shaw further cemented his reputation as an artist through his association and friendship with fellow abstract artists Morris and Gallatin. The trio soon was regarded as the 'Park Avenue Cubists’.
As a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, Shaw became an impassioned defender of the style. His 1938 essay in the American Abstract Artists yearbook, “A Word to the Objector” acted as a defense against those who failed to see the illustrative quality of abstract art and scolded those who disregarded American artists as serious Abstractionists. He was also an influential force at the Museum of Modern Art, where he sat on the Advisory Board from 1936 to 1941.
In the later years of Shaw’s life he continued to produce abstract paintings, yet in a more private manner. He was known to be a reserved man— a ‘gentleman’; not much is known about his personal life in these later years. During this time he maintained his career as a writer, publishing the well-known children’s book "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" in 1940 and two books of poems in 1959 and 1962.
Shaw exhibited with Bertha Schaefer Gallery nearly every year during the 1960s. He also showed regularly during this period at the Passadoit Gallery, had solo exhibitions at the University of Louisville and the Century Club, and was included in exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1974, Shaw died in New York leaving over fifty boxes of his belongings to the Archives of American Art. This gift consisted of manuscripts for over two thousand poems, sketchbooks filling up ten boxes, his daily journal kept from 1919 to 1972 and hundreds of menus, playbills, invitations and photographs. The value of these papers lies in the extensive history and enormous amount of information they offer a social historian or anyone who desires a peak into the life of the artist.
Shaw’s work is part of most major collections of American art, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; the Brooklyn Museum, NY; the Carnegie Museum, PA; the Denver Art Museum, CO; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA; the Phillips Collection, Washington DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, among others.
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