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Image of Untitled

John McLaughlin

American
(1898–1975)

Untitled
1955

Oil on canvas
32.25 x 38.25 x 0.875 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
1996.53

John McLaughlin was a pioneer of hard-edge abstraction, which was a distinctive genre in West Coast art after World War II. The absence of identifiable imagery and referential color, line, and shape, as seen in Untitled, 1955, is predicated on contemplation, or as the artists put it “without benefit of a guiding principle.”

McLaughlin was born in Massachusetts in 1898. He grew up regularly visiting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, paying particular attention to their Japanese print collection. Later, he spent several years in Japan during the 1930s, studied Japanese art, and mastered the language, serving in WWII as a military translator. In his painting, therefore, he looked both east and west---to the less-is-more elegance of Japanese design, to the meditative calm of Zen Buddhism, and to the geometric abstraction of the early twentieth-century European masters Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. After the war, he settled in Dana Point, California, where he began painting full-time and lived from 1946 until his death in 1976. He was also the primary influence in the West Coast movement known as Light and Space, which occurred in the 1970s.

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John McLaughlin fue un pionero de la abstracción dura, género distintivo del arte de la Costa Oeste después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. La ausencia de imágenes identificables y de color, línea y forma referenciales, como se ve en Sin título, 1955, se basa en la contemplación, o como dicen los artistas "sin beneficiarse de un principio rector."

McLaughlin nació en Massachusetts en 1898. Creció visitando regularmente el Museo de Bellas Artes de Boston, prestando especial atención a su colección de grabados japoneses. Más tarde, pasó varios años en Japón durante la década de 1930, estudió arte japonés y dominó el idioma, sirviendo en la Segunda Guerra Mundial como traductor militar. En su pintura, por tanto, miró tanto a Oriente como a Occidente: a la elegancia del menos es más del diseño japonés, a la calma meditativa del budismo zen y a la abstracción geométrica de los maestros europeos de principios del siglo XX Kazimir Malevich y Piet Mondrian. Después de la guerra, se instaló en Dana Point, California, donde empezó a pintar a tiempo completo y vivió desde 1946 hasta su muerte en 1976. También fue la principal influencia en el movimiento de la Costa Oeste conocido como Light and Space, que se produjo en la década de 1970.

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abstraction, black, brown, cream, geometric abstraction, rectangles, tan

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LA: Hard-Edge

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