JOHN FERREN WAS ONE OF THE FEW MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ABSTRACT ARTISTS to come to artistic maturity in Paris. A native of California, in 1924 Ferren went to work for a company that produced plaster sculpture. He briefly attended art school in San Francisco. Later he served as an apprentice to a stonecutter. By 1929, Ferren had saved enough money to go to Europe, stopping first in New York where he saw the Gallatin Collection. He went to France and to Italy. In Saint-Tropez, he met Hans Hofmann, Vaclav Vytlacil, and other Hofmann students. When Ferren stopped to visit them in Munich, he saw a Matisse exhibition, an experience that was instrumental in shifting his work from sculpture to painting.[1] In Europe, Ferren did not pursue formal art studies, although he sat in on classes at the Sorbonne and attended informal drawing sessions at the Académie Ranson and the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére. Instead, Ferren said, he "literally learned art around the café tables in Paris, knowing other artists and talking."
After this initial year in Europe, Ferren returned to California. By 1931 he was again in Paris, where he lived for most of the next seven years.[2] Surrounded by the Parisian avant-garde, Ferren wrestled with his own idiom. His diaries from these years indicate far-ranging explorations---from a Hofmann-like concern for surface to the spiritual searches of Kandinsky and Mondrian.[3]
Although Gallatin and Morris were the first Americans to buy his paintings, Ferren associated with members of the Abstraction-Création group rather than with the American expatriate community. He married the daughter of a Spanish artist, Manuel Ortiz de Zarate. Through this union he met the circle of Parisian-Spanish painters that included Picasso, Miró , and Torres-Garcia. With Jean Hélion, Ferren wrote manifestoes against Surrealism, although he remained friendly with Max Ernst and André Breton, and illustrated books by Surrealist poets. In Paris, he met Pierre Matisse, who in 1936 hosted a show of Ferren's work at his New York gallery.
Following his divorce in 1938, Ferren returned to the United States. He attended American Abstract Artist meetings, but felt little of the frustration that had prompted the organization's formation. After Ad Reinhardt used Ferren's name on a pamphlet passed out on the Museum of Modern Art picket line, Ferren broke from the group.
During World War II, Ferren served with the Office of War Information in the North African and European theaters. By this time, Ferren had reintroduced the figure into his paintings without giving up abstraction, and following the war he turned to Abstract Expressionism.
In moving from geometric abstraction to the academically based figure and still-life paintings he did after the war, and finally to the freely painted expressionist work of his later years, Ferren searched for a way to express moral truth. Throughout his life, he viewed painting as a means of seeking the reality behind appearance. His early appreciation of Kandinsky and a fascination with Zen that dated from his youth helped define the way he thought about painting throughout his life. He called art the "great common denominator between knowledge and insight," and said it should explore the intuitive---the spiritual, mental, social or psychological---forces of life.[4]
Ferren's Untitled relief of 1937 reflects an approach he developed while working at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17. Hayter introduced Ferren to a nineteenth-century printing technique in which an etched and inked plate is imprinted on wet plaster. The plaster was then carved and painted, using the etched lines as a guide. Pierre Matisse showed several of these plasters in the 1936 exhibition of Ferren's work and gave Ferren a contract to do more. After a year, Ferren gave up the medium entirely, despite the positive reception this work received in the New York press.[5] The lively surfaces, clear color, and unusual technique reflect Ferren's noncanonical search for new means of expression.
Ferren was an early member of the Club, an organization of Abstract Expressionists, and in 1955 served as its president. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum School, the Cooper Union, and Queens College.
2. Interview with Paul Cummings, 7 June 1968, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., used with the permission of
Mrs. Rae Ferren. For more information about Ferren's years in Paris, and
his sojourn in 1932 and 1933 in Mallorca, see James Fitzsimmons, "A John
Ferren Profile," Art Digest 27, no. 10 (15 February 1953): 11, 25--26.
3. In late 1931 Ferren wrote: "Painting coming near the surface," a
direct reflection of Hofmann; less than two weeks later he described
articles by Kandinsky and Henri Doerner in an issue of Cahiers D'Art as
"expressing perfectly my hitherto original opinion," and continued,
"Voila---I am reconvinced that my vague gropings are correct." Diary
entries from 9 December and 21 December 1931, Ferren Papers, Archives of
American Art, roll 371.
4. Typescript entitled "Address to Advanced Painting Class, Brooklyn
Museum Art School," 8 April 1949, Ferren Papers, Archives of American
Art, roll N69--98.
5. Ferren described this work in an interview with Dorothy Seckler, 12
June 1965, Archives of American Art. It is used with the permission of
Mrs. Rae Ferren.
1. Craig Ruffin Bailey, "John Ferren," in John R. Lane and Susan C.
Larsen, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927--1944
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in
association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1983), p. 77.
Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg."The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction, 1930-1945" (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 64-67. Copyright 1989 Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.