Jack Wolfe: Beyond the Known

JACK WOLFE (1924-2007) In 1959, after a series of wildly successful solo museum and gallery exhibitions, as well as group exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his work was shown alongside Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler and many others, Jack Wolfe was asked by a young student what he was thinking about when he painted a canvas he had titled Chorus. To the student, he responded, “In the formal sense as you mean it, I was not thinking. Art is a communication. The artist looks at a picture, maybe on the wall or out the window … a country scene … and he looks beyond, as far as you can see and then further beyond into space. The artist is involved with space, beyond, beyond and beyond and then almost further than imagination.” From this place beyond imagination, Jack Wolfe enjoyed a career with every hallmark of success. Every hallmark that is, except for fame. To Wolfe, fame and success were opposing ideals, and very early on he made an unshakable commitment, not to marketability and commercial advancement, but to his unique vision as an artist and his integrity as a man.

In this sense, the elegant, daring and consequential paintings we have from Wolfe today speak for themselves.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924, and raised in Brockton, Massachusetts, Wolfe studied first at RISD and then under the great Boston Expressionist, Karl Zerbe, with classmates Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the late 1940s. Almost immediately, he attained representation at Boston’s distinguished Margaret Brown Gallery, alongside Alexander Calder and other cutting edge Moderns that defied the more conservative tastes of New England collectors at the time. By 1953 he had his first of dozens of subsequent museum exhibitions and became one of the earliest artists championed by the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The 1950s marked additional achievements, such as inclusion in the traveling exhibition, New Talent in the USA with the American Federation of the Arts, and paintings in two Whitney Museum Annuals, where the Whitney purchased one of Wolfe’s large triptychs for their permanent collection. In 1958, two of Wolfe’s works, his widely acclaimed Portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his five paneled Crucifixion were chosen by the US Information Agency for exhibition at the Salzburg Biennial and circulated throughout Europe, where they were met with widespread acclaim.

After winning both the first Margaret Brown Memorial Award and the Clarissa Bartlett Graduate Scholarship in 1958, Wolfe embarked on a year of travel, briefly stopping to paint in Mexico before settling in San Francisco. Upon his return in 1959, the deCordova Museum hosted Wolfe’s third solo exhibition, featuring work made during his time in California where it was reported that “more than 500 persons attended the opening. Competitive bidding added to the general mood of excitement. Eleven paintings were sold on the spot.” Of that exhibition, it was written in the Sudbury Mass Weekly Independent that, “Mr. Wolfe ranges in his work from fine portraiture to the most extreme abstractionism, both done with great success. He has been called the American inheritor of French cubism, a logical descendent of Picasso.” Edgar Driscoll added in the Boston Globe, “To those who have followed this 34 year old artist … the promise he had seems to be fulfilled. To our mind he has hit national stature chiefly because this always powerful and individualistic young painter has added a new dimension – depth.”

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