James McGarrell
James McGarrell ( born February 22, 1930 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an American painter, known for his figurative paintings of lush interiors and landscapes. For several years he has also worked as abstract painter.
Life and work
McGarrell began his painting in the basement of his parents at the age of 20 years. His first formal studies of art, he first took on at Indiana University and at the School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He studied painting at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1955, McGarrell had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Frank Perls in Beverly Hills and got in the same year a Fulbright Scholarship to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart.
After his return from Germany in 1956, began a long academic career at Reed College in Portland, Oregon for McGarrell. Three years later he revisited the Indiana University in order to graduate the local postgraduate program for painting. In 1981 he accepted a teaching position at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. He worked for each short Teit also a teacher at other universities, for example, at the school of Skowhegan, the International School of Umbria, Italy, at Rice University, the University of Utah at Arizona State University and Dartmouth College.
During the last half century McGarrell had more than one hundred solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in America, England, France and Italy. His paintings, prints and drawings have been shown in hundreds of exhibitions in the United States, South America, Europe and Japan.
He is a member of the National Academy of Design and corresponding member of the Académie des Beaux- Arts de l'Institut de France. In 1995 he was awarded the Jimmy Ernst Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His work has been on five Whitney biennials and other biennials, twice on the Carnegie International Exhibition (1958 and 1983); at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1960 ), the Tate Gallery, London (1963 and 1964 );, Toulouse shown at the documenta III (1964 ) in Kassel and at the Musée des Augustins in France. He was one of five artists who participated in the representation of the figurative tradition in American art in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1968. McGarrells paintings are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Portland Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and many other public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe.
James McGarrell is married to the writer and translator Ann McGarrell.
Literature and sources
- Documenta III. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture; Volume 2: Hand drawings; Volume 3: Industrial design, graphic; Kassel / Cologne 1964
- Gerrit Henry " James McGarrell at George Adams ," Art in America, March 2003