Charlotte Park (artist)

Charlotte Park (1918–2010) was an American abstract painter. She began work as a professional artist soon after the close of World War II, working in studios first in Manhattan and then in eastern Long Island. She was associated with and drew both support and inspiration from her husband James Brooks and other first-generation abstract expressionist artists, including particularly her neighbors, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.[1] During most of her career she neither sought nor received praise from critics and collectors, but late in life was celebrated for the quality of her artistic achievements and had her work shown in prestigious solo and group exhibitions.[2][3] At the end of her life a critic said, "Hers was a major gift all but stifled by a happily embraced domesticity and by the critical bullying of a brutally doctrinaire art world."[note 1]

Charlotte Park
Born(1918-12-26)December 26, 1918
Concord, Massachusetts
DiedDecember 26, 2010(2010-12-26) (aged 92)
East Hampton, Long Island, New York
NationalityU. S. citizen
Known forArtist

Early life and training

Park was born in Concord, Massachusetts on March 11, 1918.[4] She graduated from the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1939 but put off a career in art until after the close of World War II.[5][note 2] In 1945 Park moved from Washington, D.C. to Manhattan and there took night classes from with the Cubist painter Wallace Harrison who taught a geometric style of flat patterns.[7]:5[8][note 3]

Career in art

Park met James Brooks a fellow artist in Washington DC while working for the OSS. After moving to Manhattan in 1945, Park shared studio space with Brooks, and married him two years later.[11] Brooks obtained the space when his friends, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, vacated it on moving to East Hampton, Long Island.[10] In 1949 Park and Brooks set up a studio in Montauk, Long Island and in 1954, when a hurricane blew the building off its foundation, they moved what remained of it to an area of East Hampton called Springs and there set up a pair of adjoining studios now known as the Brooks-Park Heritage Project.[3][7]:6

In 1949 Park began teaching at Leonard School for Girls and subsequently became an instructor first at the Dalton School then, between 1955 and 1957, at the People's Art Center of the Museum of Modern Art.[1][7]:6[note 4][note 5] In 1952 she participated in a group show at the Peridot Gallery and the following year she had a painting in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[7]:6[15][note 6] In 1954 she participated in a group show at the Guild Hall in East Hampton.[18] The Tanager Gallery in Manhattan presented her first solo show in 1957.[19]

Park showed often during the later 1950s, particularly in group exhibitions at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery.[3][note 7] She showed infrequently during the 1960s. Records show only that her work appeared in Manhattan at group shows at the Tanager Gallery (1959), the James Gallery (1960), and the Alonzo Gallery (1969) and, on Long Island, in group shows at East Hampton Guild Hall (1960), Setauket Gallery North (1965), and Southhampton Parrish Art Museum (1970).[note 8] She showed more frequently in the 1970s, including solo exhibitions at the Benson Gallery (1973 and 1976) and the Guild Hall (1979) as well as group exhibitions in those and other Long Island galleries.[23] Her work was also included in a 1979 group show at the American Cultural Center in Paris.[25]

In the 1980s Charlotte's output declined and most of the exhibitions of her work from this time until her death in 2010 were retrospective in nature.[23] These shows include a 1981 joint exhibition with Brooks at Himelfarb Gallery, East Hampton; a 1985 show called Hampton Artists at the Arbitrage Gallery in Manhattan; a 1991 show of works on paper from members of the New York School at Elston Fine Arts in New York; a 1995 show of Women in the Fifties at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York; and solo exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum (2002) and Sanierman Modern (2010).[23][26] She was given a major retrospective at the Berry Campbell Gallery in 2016.[23]

Artistic style and critical reception
I don’t want to be known as a female artist. I want to be known as a good artist.[27]
Charlotte Park, Untitled (Black and Gray IV), about 1950 Gouache on paper, 17 7/8 x 22 15/16 inches
Charlotte Park, Aztec, about 1955, oil on canvas, 22 x 13 inches
Charlotte Park, Untitled, about 1960 Oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches
Charlotte Park, Gypsophilia, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 18 inches
Charlotte Park, Untitled, about 1985, acrylic on paper, 14 x 14 inches

Park was a first-generation abstract expressionist who favored both geometric and gestural forms.[28] Although she drew inspiration from natural objects, her paintings are non representational.[19][29] She liked to visit other East Hampton artists in their studios and picked up ideas from seeing their work.[30][27]

Park worked on both paper and canvas. She made gouaches, oils, collages, and acrylics. Her paintings tended to be smaller than those of other abstract expressionist artists.[7]:8 In the early 1950s she often made black and white as well as colored gouache paintings on paper and also made gestural drawings in this period.[7]:8 [31] A critic said of this work, in general, that "Ms. Park effortlessly reconciled painting and drawing, deriving a lively formal vocabulary from clusters of loops and spheres."[30] Of the work on paper in particular, another critic wrote: "Complex interactive layering animates the painted surfaces, which often conceal as much as they reveal. Organic and calligraphic shapes jockey for position, yet are held firmly in place by implicit structure."[32] Later in the decade she made some larger oil paintings mostly employing subtler color choices than before. Her handling of oils at this time included use of a palette knife to apply and scrape off pigment.[7]:8 Discussing this technique, a critic for the New York Times said she scraped, built up, and revised to create "a varied, sensuously appealing surface."[19] At the end of the decade she made collages, often cutting up and re-assembling parts of earlier paintings.[7]:9 During the 1960s she leaned toward square shaped paintings having softer colors than previously.[7]:9

Park's untitled gouache in black and gray, painted about 1950 (shown at right) shows her handling of this medium in the absence of colors at this time. Her painting entitled Aztec of about 1955 (shown at left) is an example of her early use of oil on canvas while the untitled painting of about 1960 (shown at right) is an example of her later use of the medium.

In the 1970s she made acrylic drawings on paper and canvas that gave the effect, as a critic said, of a geometric pattern in which "form and space can be made to seem interchangeable in the eye."[33][34] During the next decade and until Alzheimer's forced her to retire from painting she created relatively small paintings and drawings having areas of bright color offset by areas of white. A critic saw in these works echoes of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.[35] Another critic described them at some length: "There is a special kind of refinement in the way Charlotte Park's paintings and drawings stretch the eye and increasingly absorb the mind with gentle, abstract color delineations and their subtle, lost and found, dissolving echoes. These echoes establish soft, engaging visual complexities... Part of the unusual effect is in the feeling of participation in visually completing the suggested connections, or associations. Some lines meet in ways that invoke illusions of structures; others curve and float independently, offering a more abstract engagement. The sense of boundless white infinity is important as a field for reflections and vibrancy."[26]

Park's Gypsophilia of 1973 (at left) shows her late use of acrylic on canvas and her untitled painting of about 1985 (shown at right) shows her use of acrylic on paper at an even later date.

She did not ordinarily give titles to works and when she did she used terms that evoked feelings rather than natural objects.[7]:8 She once said that she drew inspiration for a group of paintings she made about 1955—ones entitled Aztec, Initiation, Parade, and Lament—from the black paintings of Francisco Goya.[27]

Park achieved critical recognition late in life. Writing late in her career a critic thought she was probably better known as the wife of James Brooks than as an abstract expressionist artist.[36] Writing in 2010 a critic for the New York Times said "It is probably too late for Charlotte Park, now over 90 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease, to witness her ascension into the ranks of widely known Abstract Expressionists. A natural painter and gifted colorist, she is as good as several of the artists—both men and women—in the Museum of Modern Art's current tribute to the movement, which was drawn almost entirely from its collection."[30] An East Hampton artist who knew her well said that Park believed her husband was too introverted to become successful without active management on her part. He says "it was clear that it would take a huge effort just to keep Jim’s career alive. Charlotte knew how things were slanted, and that only he really had a chance at that point in time, so she put her weight behind him so they both could survive as artists. Unfortunately, there really was no better choice at the time."[27][37]

Personal life and family

Park was born in Concord, Massachusetts on March 11, 1918. At the time the local registrar recorded her surname as Parke.[4] However, other official contemporaneous records give the spelling she used.[38][39] Her father, George Coolidge Park, died five months before her birth.[39] Her mother, Harriet Maybel Hawkes Park, first brought Park and her brother, George, to live with her own parents, Frank W. and Hattie A. Hawkes, in their home in Concord.[40] Later, after remarrying, she brought them to Washington, D. C. to live with her and her new husband, Harold Blaisdell Shepard.[41] In 1941, while living in Washington, D.C., Park worked as a volunteer for the Federal Public Housing Authority. She subsequently took a position in a graphics unit of the Office of Strategic Services.[11][note 9]

An OSS colleague introduced Park to her future husband, James Brooks, in 1945.[7] Wishing to become a professional artist, she moved to Manhattan where she took an apartment in Gramercy Park.[7] Brooks, who had lived in Manhattan prior to the war, returned there, and the two were married in 1947.[7] They had no children [11] In 1949 they moved to Montauk, NY. Park died on December 26, 2010 at her home in East Hampton.

Notes
  1. The writer was Robert Pincus-Witten, writing in Art Forum (quoted in a posting on Hamptons Art Hub).[3]
  2. From its founding as the nation's first university arts school in 1869 the School of Fine Arts at Yale accepted women students. Like their male counterparts, these women were expected to follow art as a profession.[6]
  3. Wallace Harrison was an Australian-born artist and art teacher who lived and studied in Paris before settling in Manhattan. During the years following the close of World War II he maintained a studio in west Greenwich Village at 14th Street and 7th Avenue where he worked and taught.[9] Helen Frankenthaler and Park's future husband, James Brooks, were also his students.[10] A committed Cubist, he was, in the words of Frankenthaler, "a mad Francophile and crazy about Picasso and Lipchitz."[9]
  4. The Leonard School for Girls was founded in 1937. It taught students from prekindergarten through high school. Subjects included arts, crafts, dramatics, music, sports, dancing, voice, and personality culture.[12]
  5. The People's Art Center of the Museum of Modern Art taught free classes in painting, ceramics, collage, and assemblage to children and adults over the years between 1948 and 1970.[13] Victor D'Amico was its founder and director.[14]
  6. The Peridot Gallery, at 6 E. 12th St. in Greenwich Village, specialized in shows of contemporary art by abstractionists, many of whom would, in time, be recognized as leaders of the Abstract Expressionist movement. In addition to her husband, James Brooks, they included Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, and Philip Guston.[16][17]
  7. The Stable Gallery became famous for its mid-1950s exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists, women as well as men. Its 1954 annual included Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Grace Hartigan, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning.[20] In 2001 Hilton Kramer, critic for the New York Observer said, "At Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery, the annual exhibitions of contemporary American art were often of far greater artistic interest than the annual or biennial surveys at the Whitney Museum."[21]
  8. Tanager,[22] James,[23] Alonzo,[24] Guild Hall,[23] Gallery North,[23] Parrish[23]
  9. Park's work at OSS was quite likely in the Cartographic Section which produced specialty maps and other graphic aids for reports, presentations, and use in the field.[42]

References
  1. "Artists — James Brooks - Charlotte Park". Brooks Park Heritage Project. Retrieved 2019-07-04.
  2. Benjamin Genocchio (2006-11-26). "Sand, Sea and Abstraction". New York Times. New York, New York. p. LI12. Ms. Park's works are a revelation, for she is little known and began to draw attention only after the death of her husband, the painter James Brooks, in 1992. Her all-over compositions with messy blocky shapes covering the entire paper have a tremendous vitality and energy. She is also a great colorist.
  3. Charles A. Riley II (2016-02-29). "Charlotte Park Paintings Reveal Major AB-EX Talent". Hamptons Art Hub. Retrieved 2019-07-05.
  4. "Mabel H Hawkes in entry for Charlotte Parke, 1918". "Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1920", database with images, FamilySearch.
  5. "James Brooks and Charlotte Park papers". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2019-07-04.
  6. Judith Schiff (2009). "The first female students at Yale". Yale Alumni Magazine. 73 (1). Retrieved 2019-07-04.
  7. Charlotte Park. Spanierman Gallery LLC. 2007. pp. 2–9. ISBN 978-0-945936-85-5.
  8. "Helen Frankenthaler: Paintings on Paper (1949-2002)". Studio International. 2003-05-12. Retrieved 2019-07-06.
  9. "Oral History Interview With Helen Frankenthaler, 1968". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2019-07-06.
  10. Dorothy Seckler (1976). "Interview: James Brooks Talks with Dorothy Seckler". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 16 (1): 12–20. JSTOR 1556873.
  11. "Paid Notice: Deaths, Brooks, Charlotte Park". New York Times. New York, New York. 2011-01-05. p. A21.
  12. "Leonard School to Open". New York Sun. New York, New York. 1945-09-11. p. 5.
  13. "People's Art Center Courses" (PDF). Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 2019-07-07.
  14. Laurel Humble (2016). "Response and Responsibility: The War Veterans' Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art". City University of New York. Retrieved 2019-07-07.
  15. 1953 Annual exhibition of contemporary American painting. Whitney Museum of American Art. 1953.
  16. "Non-Objective Art Shown at Peridot". New York Times. New York, New York. 1949-04-08. p. 23.
  17. "7 Galleries Show 400 Art Objects". New York Times. New York, New York. 1949-12-03. p. 13.
  18. Stuart Preston (1954-08-08). "Both Old and New: Exhibitions at Yonkers and eash Hampton". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X8.
  19. "Art: Gallery Pot-Pourri: Recent Abstractions by Charlotte Park Among Work on Exhibition Here". New York Times. New York, New York. 1957-11-08. p. 32. [These recent abstractions] are crisp, well-composed works, moving close to the surface of the canvas. Some are very active in movement suggesting a flooding openness, as if her theme were the sea. Others are more quiet, with resounding forms in orange or red held in a rich black matrix. By scraping, building up and revising, Miss Park has achieved a varied, sensuously appealing surface.
  20. "Third Annual at the Stable Gallery, 1954". Archived from the original on February 9, 2012. Retrieved July 9, 2019.
  21. Hilton Kramer (2001-08-06). "The Borgenicht Legacy, the Glory of the 50s There were fewer artists, fewer galleries, fewer reviews and many fewer collectors". New York Observer. New York, New York. p. 1.
  22. Dore Ashton (1959-01-09). "Art: Tenth Street Stroll: Group Show and Several Debuts Mark Exhibitions at Downtown Galleries". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 31.
  23. "Display Ad: Alonzo Gallery". New York Times. New York, New York. 1969-05-11. p. D25.
  24. Flora Lewis (1979-10-03). "Two Paris Shows a la Pollock: 'Jackson Broke the Ice' Recalls Early Loft Days". New York Times. New York, New York. p. C21.
  25. Phyllis Braff (1981-08-20). "From the Studio". East Hampton Star. East Hampton, New York. p. B5. There is a special kind of refinement in the way Charlotte Park's paintings and drawings stretch the eye and increasingly absorb the mind with gentle, abstract color delineations and their subtle, lost and found, dissolving echoes. These echoes establish soft, engaging visual complexities. Dominant images are rhythms of bright spectrum colors sparsely placed against white area. This gives each work a spacious, open quality, and sets up a surface structure that works with a dialogue of visual pulls between shimmering lines of color.
  26. Mike Solomon (2013-09-20). "Gutsy Paintings by Charlotte Park". Hamptons Art Hub. Retrieved 2019-07-05.
  27. R.C. Baker (2008-01-23). "The Grand Delusion". Village Voice. New York, New York. p. 60. Ms. Park's works are a revelation, for she is little known and began to draw attention only after the death of her husband, the painter James Brooks, in 1992. Her all-over compositions with messy blocky shapes covering the entire paper have a tremendous vitality and energy. She is also a great colorist.
  28. "Nature in an Untouched State, Before Suburbia Called". New York Times. New York, New York. 2007-02-18. M
  29. Roberta Smith (2010-11-19). "Charlotte Park". New York Times. New York, New York. p. C28.
  30. Phyllis Braff (1980-09-04). "From the Studio". East Hampton Star. East Hampton, New York. p. 8.
  31. Helen Harrison (2002-12-08). "Arts & Entertainment: Art Reviews; Landscapes of Fantasy, and a Devotion to Color 'Three East End Artists'". New York Times. New York, New York. p. LI21. This body of her work has not been seen in depth for many years, and it confirms her status as a New York School abstractionist of the first rank. Seldom does a painter have such control over intense color -- for example ion 'No.6 (Montauk),' in which the sharpness of complementary contrasts is subtly muted and harmonized. Complex interactive layering animates the painted surfaces, which often conceal as much as they reveal. Organic and calligraphic shapes jockey for position, yet are held firmly in place by implicit structure. These are not mere virtuoso formal exercises, however; their emotional undercurrents are as strong as their technical qualities.
  32. Phillis Braff (1978-05-03). "From the Studio". East Hampton Star. East Hampton, New York. p. II-6. Charlotte Park's exhibition concentrates thoughts on pictorial considerations, particularly those that deal with space, color, and illusion.
  33. "Women's Art". East Hampton Star. East Hampton, New York. 1979-04-19. p. II-7.
  34. Helen Harrison (1981-08-23). "Art: Married Artists' Own Styles". New York Times. New York, New York. p. LI25. She combines whimsicality and architectonic structure in the manner of Paul Klee, injecting the abstracted result with the confined dynamism of his 'Twittering Machine.'
  35. B.H. Friedman (1984-12-06). "Downs and Park". East Hampton Star. East Hampton, New York. p. 9. Charlotte Park's [colors]—often primary—are more isolated and are grounded in geometric abstraction. There are hints of a free grid, a sort of musical scaffolding.
  36. He added that "Thanks to the joint effort, they did succeed and managed to live comfortably off the sales of his work for the last 50 years of their lives. Charlotte actually reveled in this and in her support of her husband, and had no envy or bitterness, another indication of her great character and dignity. Her husband’s success allowed them both to paint and live the way they wanted to live, unencumbered by having to hold steady jobs. Occasional teaching was the only ancillary work they performed; she taught art at MoMA and was a favorite of the many artists’ kids who took her classes there."[27]
  37. "H Maybel Hawkes in entry for George Coolidge Park, 30 Mar 1917". "Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1920," database with images, FamilySearch; citing Birth, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States, certificate number 34, page 579, State Archives, Boston.
  38. "Harriet M Hawkes in entry for George Coolidge Park, 11 Mar 1918". "Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1920," database with images, FamilySearch; citing Death, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States, certificate number 28, page 104, State Archives, Boston.
  39. "CCharlotte Park in household of Frank W Hawkes, Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States". "United States Census, 1920," database with images, FamilySearch; citing ED 114, sheet 12A, line 30, family 258, NARA microfilm publication T625 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992), roll 706; FHL microfilm 1,820,706.
  40. "Charlotte Park in household of Harold Shepard, Ward 7, Cambridge, Cambridge City, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States". "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch; citing enumeration district (ED) 16-88, sheet 12A, line 17, family 241, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 1685.
  41. "War Report of the OSS" (PDF). History Project, Strategic Services Unit, War Department, Washington, D.C. Retrieved 2019-07-04.
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