IN PERSPECTIVE
Lone Wolfe
JACK WOLFE preferred to stay outside the lines. Stylistically, though often associated with the Boston Expressionists, the painter melded a penchant for rich, penetrating color with elements of Cubism, Ab-Ex, and hard-edge abstraction. Socially, he strayed from the typical New York art world confines after his initial success within that milieu and instead forged his own path. The result was a significant, challenging body of work and the space—both mental and physical—to keep adding to it.
CK Contemporary is now the exclusive representative of Wolfe’s estate. On October 16, the San Francisco-based gallery will open the first major retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2007. Gallery-goers and collectors will be treated to works like Arctic (1971), a diamondshaped acrylic on canvas that features passages of blues, pinks, and blacks rendered in a variety of textures, applications, and styles. The brilliantly-colored Spanish Window (1968) melds hard-edge abstraction with dynamic, painterly brushwork, while Blubar (1976) fuses geometric, gridded shapes with dynamic Ab-Ex linework. The amber-and gray-hued Chorus (1959) and jeweltoned Archer (1963) show Wolfe creating dense, exuberant abstractions that see eye-to-eye with the most famous names of Ab-Ex, while Aegean, a languid, vertically-oriented blue and orangey-red abstraction from the 1960s, reveals the artist’s ability to let his compositions and brushwork breathe.
Wolfe was born in Omaha, Neb., in 1924 but spent his formative years in Brockton, Mass. He studied art at RISD and then at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in the late 1940s, among classmates like Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly.
He found success easily in Boston, gaining representation at the Margaret Brown Gallery and showing at venues like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In the 1950s, he hit it big in New York. He had a string of solo gallery and museum shows and exhibited in group shows alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, and Helen Frankenthaler, among other pioneering midcentury artists.
During this period, Wolfe was also included in the American Federation for the Arts’ traveling exhibition “New Talent in the USA,” and the U.S. Information Agency selected his paintings to be shown in the Salzburg Biennial and tour Europe in 1958. Wolfe’s work was in two Whitney Annuals, and the museum acquired one of his large triptychs for its permanent collection. Wolfe also won the first Margaret Brown Memorial Award and the Clarissa Bartlett Graduate Scholarship in 1958. These awards sparked a year
