GEROME KAMROWSKI
An American Surrealist
An American Surrealist
illustration:
Kamrowski (1914-2014)
Feted Wedding, 1945 Oil on canvas 72 x 48 inches All rights reserved, 2024. This catalog may not be reproduced in whole or in any part, in any form or by any means both electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of Lincoln Glenn. Catalog design by Clanci Jo Conover
images © Estate of Gerome Kamrowski September 28 - November 16, 2024
(646) 764 - 9065
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Gerome Kamrowski
Foreword
After presenting a body of paintings by fellow American surrealist David Hare, we are pleased to present our inaugural exhibition on Gerome Kamrowski’s (1914 - 2004) early surrealist works from the 1930s and 1940s at 542 West 24th Street. This exhibition, the first for the artist in New York since the 2004 presentation by the esteemed Washburn Gallery, will be followed by a second Lincoln Glenn exhibition in 2025 focusing on Kamrowski’s importance and proximity to the birth of abstract expressionism in the United States. Early in 2025, our Surrealist exhibition series will continue with the dreamlike paintings of Kamrowski’s contemporary, Juanita Guccione. These exhibitions will further illuminate the diverse and inventive influences of Surrealist artists within the mosaic of 20th century American Art.
It is remarkable that André Breton, father of the international Surrealist movement, praised Kamrowski for his originality and innovation, a sentiment that we intensely share. In fact, the present exhibition at our gallery coincides with a major exhibition titled Surrealism at Centre Pompidou in Paris, which celebrates the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s founding Manifesto and includes a shadow box collage by Kamrowski. Simultaneously, the Musée National Picasso-Paris includes the celebrated Collaborative Painting by Kamrowski in Jackson Pollock, The Early Years. Already a cult hero in Michigan, where Kamrowski worked for the second half of his life, the international art community is beginning to take notice of Kamrowski’s contributions to multiple major art movements.
This exhibition is the culmination of over two years of communication and collaboration with the Estate of Gerome Kamrowski, dating back to when we first opened our doors in Larchmont. Once our gallery relocated to New York, we identified Kamrowski as one of the artists we most desired to present in a solo exhibition. Sean Tucker, grandson of and authority on the artist, facilitated logistics and research that made imaginable the assembling of this collection of works. Additionally, we are immensely grateful to Murray Rosen for his unending interest in Kamrowski’s oeuvre and biography, fittingly reflected in the following essay.
We hope this exhibition reveals Kamrowski’s unique brand of abstract surrealism, and we hope to see you in our galleries this season.
Warmly,
Doug Gold & Eli Sterngass
Panoramas and Connections:
Gerome Kamrowski among the Surrealists by
Murray Rosen1
Gerome Kamrowski had a long and illustrious career as one of America’s greatest twentieth century artists. This essay, commissioned for "Gerome Kamrowski: An American Surrealist" at Lincoln Glenn Gallery, contextualizes Kamrowski and his early work by addressing the significance of one of his collages, Panoramagraph, published in 1943 in the New York magazine VVV, founded by the leader of Surrealism, André Breton, and by characterizing his relations with other notable artists—young American rebels and leading European emigrés fleeing Nazism and war—who communed and collaborated in New York City in the 1940s.
Kamrowski was the youngest of eleven children, born in 1914 to an immigrant Polish family in Warren, Minnesota. He was christened Hieronymous, immediately connecting the future artist and his fantastic visions across distant time and space to one of his most illustrious predecessors, Hieronymus Bosch. Kamrowski was to name one of his 1943 works in gouache and crayon, as Hieronymi (Fig. 1). 2 This piece seems to reveal a bird-like figure, suspended through swirls of bright colours, looking out from the left at and across what might be all of creation; behind it a forceful personification, perhaps one of André Breton’s ‘Great Invisibles’, which Breton urged readers of VVV magazine to imagine, in a universe previously beyond human comprehension, as a ‘new myth’.3
The young Kamrowski’s artistic preoccupations took over his life. In his late teens and early twenties, Kamrowski studied at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota and at the Art Students League in NYC; he painted murals for the Works Progress Administration, and later continued his studies with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. Kamrowski came to live in NYC in 1938 at 24 years of age and married Marianna Fargione (who bore him a son named Felix). A small early self-portrait from this time (Fig. 2) cleverly constructs an outer head with some outlined hair above, a neck below, and within it an amorphous brown brain, separated by a young man on the right, wrestling with an alternate upside-down being on the left. The alternate’s shoes transform into two small birds, and one piercing eye is prominently placed on each figure in order to twin them - or to contrast an ‘inner’ and ‘outer eye’.
Fig. 1: Hieronymi, 1943, gouache and crayon on paper, 22 x 30 in.
In 1946, Kamrowski moved on to take a teaching post at the University of Michigan School of Art after his wife’s death from cancer. He was to marry twice again, first to the artist Edith Dines and then to Mary Jane Dodman, who was with him until his death in 2004. After leaving New York, Kamrowski spent the next 50 years growing his family, teaching, experimenting with different media and forms, and continually challenging artistic fashions and boundaries. But his surrealist work had already achieved widespread prominence and been featured in dozens of group and solo exhibitions. These were mainly in New York but also across the United States, and in Paris, first at the international surrealist group exhibition at Galerie Maeght in 1947, and later in a solo show featuring 47 works at the Galerie R. Creuze in 1950. Breton himself introduced the 1950 solo exhibition by saying:
Of all the young painters whose evolution I have been able to follow in New York during the last years of the war, Gérôme Kamrowski is the one who has impressed me far the most, by reason of the quality and the sustained character of his research. … Kamrowski’s ambitious enterprise is to establish the cosmography of man’s inner worlds, which can only be undertaken, of course by having constant observation of the movements of the stars… in harmony with … modern biologists, according to whom man remains in direct contact with nature not only by means of his organs of perception but also through the agency of visceral rhythms…4
In 1947, several Kamrowski works were also included in the Hugo Gallery’s Bloodflames exhibition at 26 West 55th Street in NYC. Bloodflames was designed by Frederick Kiesler5 and was a major and fashionable exhibition, featured in Vogue magazine (which mentioned Kamrowski alongside the likes of Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, and Isamu Noguchi). Nicolas Calas’ foreword to the Bloodflames catalogue began:
Only when the artist reaches the extreme limits of both objectivism and individualism – will the fantastic and the real, the unknown and the known produce that alchemy of form and colors which transform an artificial object into any eye emanating light…
One of Kamrowski’s paintings featured in the Bloodflames exhibition, initially called Family but later renamed Internal Motion (Fig. 3), is a large, densely coloured canvas depicting a strong group
of hierarchical, plant-like heads, pods, fruits, and hairs, all looking inwards at each other in a vivid, dreamlike ambiance. This and other 1943 paintings in the present exhibition demonstrate the evolution of Kamrowski’s style at the time, taking some of the morphological structures of figuration and space from other artists of his era, but exuding his unique perspectives, subjects, and paintwork.
Kamrowski went on to produce abstract works, expressionist works, and Abstract Expressionist works. But when he left New York in 1946, he left behind the socalled New York School. This was just as Abstract Expressionism emerged from wartime American surrealism and rose to international prominence, becoming a tool of domestic and international propaganda during the Cold War. Kamrowski’s early humanism did not necessarily fit well with the culture of the post-war world: after the Second World War and the Holocaust, amidst American materialism and social inequality, the balance between humankind and the universe had radically shifted.
Significant among Kamrowski’s early artworks made in NYC are his two 1942 ink and pasted collages, reproduced on facing pages in VVV’s ‘Almanac for 1943’, called Story of Man and Panoramagraph (Fig. 4). The former depicts a version of history, arranging printed depictions of classical disciplines, tools, and figures in a web of microscopic creatures. The latter, its title a portmanteau neologism presumably invented by Kamrowski, seems to be an anti-history, a sort of map of New York culture at the time - especially bearing in mind Kamrowski’s then surrealist circle and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s description of the city in 1941: ‘The immense resources which the local plutocracy had to satisfy
Fig. 2: Self Portrait, 1939, gouache & collage on board, 8 x 4 1/2 in.
Fig. 3: Family / Internal Motion, 1943, oil on canvas, 40 x 31 in.
Fig. 4: Story of Man and Panoramagraph, in VVV issue 2-3, March 1943
its whims, made it seem as if examples of the whole of humanity’s artistic legacy were present…’.6 Panoramagraph displays live and dead organisms, a virile biped spearing or at least controlling some quadrupeds, and texts by Breton and Joan Miró together with an anonymous credo reading: Each speck of dust contains its own marvellous soul. But, in order to understand it, it is necessary to rediscover the religious and magical element of things, the element expressed by primitive peoples. But one must keep enough purity to be stirred.
Miró’s influence on Panoramagraph was overt, and not only from his pasted words (visible in VVV but lost from the original) – ‘A picture, after all, comes from a surplus of emotions and sensations. It is only a process of birth to which one never returns’. Below that, in the bottom left corner, is a drawing by Miró, cut out by Kamrowski from a page of Minotaure No. 3-4, 1933 (Fig. 5).7 Another Miró-inspired bird appears at the top right of Panoramagraph. Birds often populated surrealist works as contradictory actors, serving as both symbols of flight and freedom, overviewing the surface of the planet, and as threatening, vengeful harbingers of disaster (as later taken up in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, The Birds). For example, from the time of his collage-novel La femme 100 têtes in 1929, Max Ernst returned obsessively to ‘Loplop, Bird Superior’ as his alter ego, alias, or nemesis.8 Bird-like forms also adorned surrealist work in WWII as gestures liberated in empty sky-like space. Kamrowski’s 1940 ink and gouache work, titled Bird Man (Fig. 6), places an avian figure in the centre of a world to be discovered, its huge probing beak and claw seeking out both animate and inanimate objects strewn around. Another Kamrowski painting from 1943, The Appetite of a Bird (Fig. 7), vividly depicts a small central bird in a family of red-hot beings, making things happen out of a blistered desert.
The collage technique seen in Kamrowski’s Story of Man and Panoramagraph was a key tool in distancing images from reality and one of the hallmarks of surrealist composition. However, his collages in VVV were not entirely typical of contemporary surrealists, more drawings than decoupés, although harking back to Ernst’s use
of clippings from textbooks, old engravings, and other ready-printed papers. Twenty years earlier, Breton and Louis Aragon, another early proponent of Surrealism, had instantly praised Ernst’s collages. Their conjunction of different types of found and drawn images and texts seemed to some to give free rein to chance as opposed to deliberate selection and arrangement of heterogenous components, consistent with ‘automatism’, the automatic writing and drawing which was popular among surrealist artists. In 1936, Ernst himself had written of modelling
collage to the mechanisms of automatism and linking its dialectical structure to the concept of identity.9 But despite his own interest in automatism and Breton’s ‘objective chance’, Kamrowski’s collages in VVV were clearly considered and deliberate, more like a parody of learned scientific or historical learning, like pulling apart an old-fashioned encyclopaedia. The content of these works emphasised humankind’s attempt to know and unsuccessfully master, through measurements and machines, what really mattered— living phenomena outside of man. One of Kamrowski’s major sources was his copy of the 1942 enlarged edition of On Growth and Form, first published in 1917 by the Scottish biologist and classical scholar D’Arcy Thompson, describing the mathematical beauty of morphogenesis, the formation process for the structural patterns in plants and animals.10 Some of Thompson’s diagrams (Fig. 8) were redrawn by Kamrowski, for example, the calibrated skulls and fish at the centre and bottom right of Panoramagraph. At a time when the human capacity for destruction seemed to be overwhelming and the world was heading for the ultimate threat with the nuclear arms race, Kamrowski’s work was a proud, individual representation of what Breton called in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1929) Romanticism’s ‘amazingly prehensile tail’.11
Panoramagraph was a herald for Kamrowski’s longtime fascination with complex ways of intellectual and creative expression. He returned quickly and repeatedly to collage and other dislocating avant-garde methods, testing form throughout his life. He continuously changed gears for the most varied art-making, using all available materials (including glass, plastics and ceramics) and pioneering new methods. But the ‘maps’ and text clippings featured in Panoramagraph do not seem often repeated. Instead Kamrowski’s intensely visual, deep-framed ‘Shadowboxes’ took over. One example is Evidence of the Obscure from 1946 (Fig. 9) using what Kamrowski called ‘(im)pressionage’ – again his own invented word for a novel form of decalcomania (that is, pressing a paint-bearing material onto the picture surface) well-known to the surrealists from Oscar Dominguez. Some of Kamrowski’s Shadowboxes were shown alongside works by Joseph Cornell and others as early as April 1943 at the ‘Exhibition of Collage’ at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of this Century 12 In Evidence of the Obscure, something organic can surely be made out, maybe fossilised – a skull, or is it floral? – covered in fault lines – or are they fingerprints?
Fig. 5: Légende du Minotaure par Joan Miro in Minotaure No. 3-4 (1933)
Fig. 6: Bird Man , 1940, ink and gouache on paper, 24 x 18 in.
Fig. 7 The Appetite of a Bird , 1943, casein and oil on canvas, 30 x 36 in.
Fig. 8 Some of the diagrams of fish and skulls as coordinated in On Growth and Form (1961 abridged edition) What does this evidence show and what is left as obscure? Kamrowski’s pictures sometimes place themselves outside any specific discourse or controversy, abstracting an eternal set of concerns, distant from individual human identity, so that they can live uncluttered in their own art. In these cases, the titles are often revealing, or at least pointed, given the mystery inside.
During his early years in New York City, including the time of the creation of Story of Man and Panoramagraph, Gerome Kamrowski lived and worked among other artists influenced by Surrealism and the European emigrés fleeing Nazism. These included William Baziotes, Peter Busa, Jackson Pollock, David Hare, Robert Motherwell, and the Chilean-born Roberto Matta. Matta later referred to them as the ‘1054 group of 1940’.13 Some of them began by practising the automatic creation of artworks together, seeking to discover their common connections – a key factor in surrealist game-playing. A surviving example of such collaborative work is an early ‘drip’ painting, made with Baziotes and Pollock at Kamrowski’s apartment (then on Sullivan Street) in the winter of 1940-1941 (Fig. 10). Kamrowski later credited this collaborative work mostly to Baziotes, who he said (in an unpublished essay on his teacher Hans Hofmann in his estate archive) ‘led us to
paint with experimental mediums (or surrealist approaches) which involved surprisingly enough blind chance as well as automatism. We may have called it a “metaphysic of hazard” which led him to seek an identity in the beginnings of a night world’.14 Automatism was foregrounded in the early work of the ‘1054 Group’, perhaps as a means to maintain trust in the mysteries of nature and creativity amidst the shattered values of the time.15
In a 1967 interview, Motherwell spoke of his first meeting with Kamrowski, calling him casually, ‘a depressed man who expressed interest in our proposed project [‘we’ being Matta, Baziotes, Busa, Pollock, and Motherwell] and did begin work in these directions’.16 In another interview two decades later, in November 1987, Motherwell dubbed Kamrowski ‘the most surrealist of us all’.17 This was not necessarily said in flattery, given Motherwell’s disdain for Surrealism by then.18 Surrealism was not universally popular in Manhattan’s art establishment. But Kamrowski was the ‘most surrealist’ because, at least looking back from forty years later, he had maintained his surrealist values through all his experimentation with art. Perhaps because of these deep surrealist values, Kamrowski relinquished the Guggenheim Scholarship which had supported his first years in New York. The Director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Baroness Hilla Rebay, had a notorious hatred of Surrealism, and in early 1944 refused him a further scholarship ‘ever again’.19 However, this disdain was not shared by all. Indeed, in his book accompanying a 1944 group exhibition at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery (later Betty Parsons’) at East 57th Street, Sidney Janis wrote that Kamrowski ‘converts accident into an anatomical electric light system – a magical object’.20
The archetypal imagery of Kamrowski’s New York years looked to natural science as well as his mighty imagination, setting organic elements to float in layered spaces, overlapping veils, and bursts of mist and colour.21 He envisaged evolution in the human psyche, and growth, decay, and transformation over time. His charismatic play-instinct and his take on man and the universe were expressed through diverse materials and techniques, often his own. But major influences on Kamrowski must have included Matta and Gordon Onslow Ford, and their ‘psychological morphology’. For Matta this idea delimited worlds of time and space independent of usual perception.22 In the summer of 1940, the 23-year-old David
Fig. 9: Evidence of the Obscure , 1946, collage, ink and impressionage, 11 x 14 in.
Fig. 10: Gerome Kamrowski, William, Baziotes, Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1940-41, oil & enamel on canvas, 19 1/4 x 25 3/4 in., Rowland Weinstein, courtesy Weinstein Gallery © Estate of Gerome Kamrowski
Hare, who was soon to become the nominal editor of VVV, was introduced to the European surrealists by his cousin Kay Sage, and invited Matta and Onslow Ford, who had just arrived from England, to visit him in Maine. For his part, Onslow Ford had already spread the message of surrealism in Paris and elsewhere.23 He delivered a series of four lectures about surrealism at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village in early 1941.24 There he spoke of the crisis in civilisation and the artist as ‘a psychological barometer, registering the desires and impulses of the community’, urging on them a ‘revolution in consciousness’ through the psychic force of artists (and audience) coming together. Kamrowski does not seem to have been among the host of artists who attended, but he visited the accompanying exhibition and learned from Baziotes of Onslow Ford’s exhortations.25
Although Kamrowski’s surrealism shared much with the other artists in his sphere (including Hayter, Sage, and Tanguy), much of the visual subject-matter style of Kamrowski’s paintings, the mixture of bold, streaky and subtle colours, the shrouded contours of the objects in space, was his alone. As he said in his unpublished essay on Hans Hofmann, ‘Perhaps Baziotes and myself took the excitement of the… European refugee personalities more seriously than the ideas they proposed, and the excitement led me shopping for new mediums, enamels and lacquers – an interest which Jackson Pollock shared.’ Kamrowski’s personal vision came to be inculcated by the horrors and fears of the incipient Atomic Age, both positive in scientific knowledge and negative in its actual and threatened use of discoveries such as the Bomb. For Kamrowski, the trauma of humanity’s self-inflicted devastation never receded. When reporting on his 1950 work in Paris, the Michigan Daily highlighted his recurring post-war figure, the luminous, bloodsuffused organs inside his painting series Monsieur Horror, as ‘… the concretisation of that global miasma of doom that infects the civilization of the atomic age’.26
Of his early career in New York, Kamrowski told the Detroit Monthly five decades later in 1990:
‘If I’d stayed in New York, I’d either be rich or dead… There is a sense in which my work is a search for meaning… And to a great extent I am unsuccessful… But if you don’t find it, well then you keep the souvenirs.’ 27 Throughout his decades long career, Kamrowski’s work continually questioned any and all assumptions. He collected and played with the elements for his art—pitting the subject, the collector, against the objects he collected and the objects against themselves; and putting personifications into a context of feelings, experiences, and activities vis-à-vis the universe, known and unknown, as a whole. Thus, Kamrowski’s collages create their own selected worlds of objects, animate and inanimate, and their own histories. His paintings speak to variations in a repeated story about the dynamics of humans and other collectives and interactions, from the secure and caring to the threatening, vast, and mysterious beyond us. These paintings mediate, seduce, and disrupt (a key factor in avant-garde discourse) using an enchanting palate of complementary colours to draw in and disorientate the viewer. One might go so far as to say that the visions and the information they carry interpenetrate each other in a conjoined identity of subject and object.
Endnotes
1. Murray Rosen was awarded an MA with Distinction in History of Art by the Courtauld Institute London in 2021. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester researching Surrealism in New York during WWII.
2. ‘Hieronymi’ is also a taxonomic term taken from the name of the botanist Georg Hans Emmo Wolfgang Hieronymus (1846–1921).
3. See in VVV issue 1 (June 1942) ‘Prologemena for a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else’. Kamrowski was to produce from 1945 a series of larger canvases explicitly titled ‘The Great Invisibles’. 4. As translated by Simon Watson Taylor from Breton’s French in Surrealism and Painting, 1972, London: Macdonald.
5. Among many other things, Kiesler had previously designed Art of this Century for Peggy Guggenheim, photographs of which accompanied an article about his “design-correlation” methodology, in the same issue of VVV that carried Kamrowski’s Story of Man and Panoramagraph (discussed below). Kiesler went on to install the 1947 Paris exhibition with the help of many New York artist friends: see Lucy R. Lippard ed., Surrealists on Art, Hoboken NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970, 151-153.
6. See ‘New York in 1941’ in The View from Afar, tr. Neugroschel & Hoss, 1985, London: Penguin Books. Before achieving celebrity as a structural anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss had travelled with Breton from Marseille to New York on the ship Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle
7. This was one of Miró’s nine drawings entitled ‘Légende du Minotaure par Joan Miro’ found on one page of the article ‘Emancipation de la Peinture’ by Minotaure’s artistic director E. Tériade (the pen name of Efstratios Eleftheriades).
8. See Werner Spies, Max Ernst, Loplop, The Artist’s Other Self, London: Thames & Hudson, 1983.
9. Ernst too had made it from Marseille to New York with the benefit of sponsorship from his new wife Peggy Guggenheim, who came between the two great artists, Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, in his impressive list of partners.
10. See Brandon Taylor, ‘D’Arcy Thompson’s Surrealism’ in Levy & Terranova eds., D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Generative Influences in Art, Design, and Architecture, London: Bloomsbury, 81-95, which comments on Kamrowski’s Panoramagraph and ‘the method of Surrealism conducted as a parody of science’.
11. See Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver, Helen R Lane 1972, at 153, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press – Kamrowski’s home university.
12. An entry in Kamrowski’s card index of his works refers to the title Dream Key in the ’Peggy Guggenheim Collage’ exhibition of 1943.
13. See his letter to Nancy Miller dated 11 March 1977, reproduced in Matta, Centre Pompidou 1985 at 268. (Perhaps ‘1054’ was the street number of one of their studios or ‘coldwater’ flats.)
14. In an interview with Dorothy Seckler on 5 September 1952, transcribed in the Archives of American Art, Peter Busa spoke of a WPA project after Pearl Harbor was attacked and war was declared in December 1941: ‘…Lee Krasner, who is Mrs. Jackson Pollock now, was the head of that particular project. And we were supposed to do murals. And on this was Jerry Kamrowski, myself, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock. The most unregimented group of artists that you can imagine as far as carrying out a project. And in this particular environment Mr. Willem Baziotes was instrumental in getting all of us to practice therapeutically automatic drawings…this was directly due to Bill Baziotes's influence of the automatic gesture in painting, as well as Gerome Kamrowski who was a very influential artist in my development in those days’.
15. In Sidney Simon, ‘Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939–1943: An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, Conducted in Minneapolis in December 1966’ in Art International (Summer 1967), 17-20, Busa and Matta identified the six artists as ‘the first group of American practitioners of automatic painting… Not an official group… from the point of view of sharing an ideology... we merely shared certain ideas and interests…’ and attended Matta’s studio on Ninth Street as such in the Fall/ Winter of 1942-43. In another charming exchange, Busa said ‘…Kamrowski and I were close friends. Did you know, Matta, that Kamrowski was one of the first to practice automatic painting in this country?’ and Matta replied ‘No, I wasn’t aware of that’.
16. See Sidney Simon, ‘Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School 1939-1943, An interview with Robert Motherwell conducted in New York in January 1967’, in Art International (Summer 1967) 20-23.
17. See Martica Sawin, Gerome Kamrowski, Vol 1, Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism 1940-1965, San Francisco: Weinstein Gallery, 2005 at 7. Motherwell was echoing the same phrase, used years earlier by Breton of Miró.
18. In a letter dated 6 September 1944, Motherwell urged Baziotes to break with the surrealists including Jacqueline Lamba and the Reis family (the collectors Bernard Reis, a popular accountant in the NYC art world, and his wife Becky, and their artist daughter Barbara): see the Archives of American Art, ref: baziwill 43582.
19. See in the estate archive, e.g., dated 3 April 1944: ‘Your pictures are still too decorative and there is no proper construction in it (sic), after all this time’; and 17 April 1944: ‘Of all the pupils I ever have had, you are the only one who has made almost no progress’.
20. Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Painting in America, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944 at 88. Janis was a wealthy shirt manufacturer and art collector who opened his own gallery in New York in 1948.
21. The description ‘archetypal’ deliberately invokes Jungian theory, not only because of the numinous quality of Kamrowski’s imagery, but also because the conscious or unconscious figurations of New York surrealism were often subject to Jungian interpretation and even therapy. Thus Pollock’s so-called ‘psychoanalytic’ drawings, used for Jungian analysis in his sessions with Drs Joseph L Henderson and then Violet Staub de Laszlo in 1938-1942.
22. See Matta, Entretiens Morphologiques, Notebook No 1 1936-1944, London: Sistan, 1987. Matta was a major proselytiser for automatism in New York, after being encouraged by Duchamp to escape the Nazis in Paris. In 1948, he was expelled from the surrealist group, accused of triggering the suicide of the first ‘abstract surrealist’ Arshile Gorky by his affair with his wife Agnes Magruder: see the documentary about Gorky and his surviving family, Without Gorky (2011, dir. Cosima Spender).
23. See his essay ‘The painter looks within himself’ in the London Bulletin, Issue 18-20, June 1940, at 31. ‘Objects can be extended in time so that the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly can be observed at a glance. Objects that can only be seen under the microscope are revealed. Objects containing new mathematical formulae are revealed…. The secrets contained in the universe of the human mind are being laid bare for study’.
24. The New School for Social Research on East 16th Street was an academic heart for surrealist discourse in New York, apart from Columbia University on its Morningside Campus: see Claus-Dieter Krohn, Intellectuals in Exile , Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (tr. Rita and Robert Kimber) Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
25. See Martica Sawin, Gordon Onslow Ford, Paintings and Works on Paper 1939-1951, New York: Francis M Naumann/Lucid Art Foundation, 2010, at 56-57. Attendees at Onslow Ford’s lectures included Tanguy, Sage, Kiesler, Calas, and Jennifer Johnson, who was introduced there by Motherwell to Onslow Ford and soon after married him: see Fariba Bogzaran ed., Gordon Onslow Ford, A Man on a Green Island, New York: Lucid Art Foundation, 2019 at 73. The lectures accompanied a group exhibition which Onslow Ford hung and were followed by tea and argument afterwards at The Jumble Shop on MacDougal Street.
26. See Donald R. Matheson’s art column in the issue for 11 January 1951.
27. See John Barron, ‘The Lion in Winter’ in Detroit Monthly, February 1990, 52-59.
Mind's Eye, 1939
Colored pencil on paper
10 1/2 x 11 inches
8 x 4 1/2 inches
6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
Self Portrait, 1939
Gouache and collage on board
Dream Woman, 1940
Watercolor on paper
Ink and gouache on paper
15 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches
Ink and gouache on paper
24 x 18 inches
Pink Figure, 1940
Bird Man, 1940
Fumage and ink on paper
18 x 15 inches
Ink and gouache on paper
22 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches
Black Thunder, 1940
Holy Rollers, 1940
Wanderlust, 1940
Ink and gouache on paper 24 x 16 1/2 inches
The Accused, 1940
Colored pencil on paper 4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
Untitled, 1940s
Colored pencil on board
8 x 6 1/2 inches
Untitled 3035, 1941
Ink on paper
24 x 18 inches
Limitations of Indebtedness to Nature, 1942
Enamel and oil on canvas
32 x 16 inches
Panoramagraph, 1942
Ink and collage on board
14 x 11 inches
Hieronymi, 1943
Gouache and crayon on Whatman board
22 x 30 inches
The Appetite of a Bird, 1943
Casein and oil on canvas
30 x 36 inches
Spectral, 1943
Oil on linen
26 x 18 inches
Internal Motion, 1943
Oil on canvas
40 x 31 inches
Oil on linen
25 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches
Oil on panel
30 x 22 inches
The Baby Boy, 1945
Untitled, c. 1945
The Feted Wedding, 1945
Evidence of the Obscure, 1946
Oil on canvas
72 x 48 inches
Shadowbox Ink and Impressionage
11 x 14 inches
Black and White Figure, 1947
72 x 36 inches
Feminine Constellation, 1947
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
Enamel and oil on canvas
Yellow Light, 1947
Gouache and crayon on paper
22 x 30 inches
Jack In The Box, 1950
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
List of Works
Mind's Eye, 1939
Colored pencil on paper
10 1/2 x 11 inches
Wanderlust, 1940
Ink and gouache on paper
24 x 16 1/2 inches
Self Portrait, 1939
Gouache and collage on board
8 x 4 1/2 inches
Dream Woman, 1940
Watercolor on paper
6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches
The Accused, 1940
Colored pencil on paper
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
Untitled, 1940s
Colored pencil on board
8 x 6 1/2 inches
Pink Figure, 1940
Ink and gouache on paper
15 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches
Bird Man, 1940
Ink and gouache on paper
24 x 18 inches
Untitled 3035, 1941
Ink on paper
24 x 18 inches
Black Thunder, 1940
Fumage and ink on paper
18 x 15 inches
Holy Rollers, 1940
Ink and gouache on paper
22 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches
Limitations of Indebtedness to Nature, 1942
Enamel and oil on canvas | 32 x 16 inches
Panoramagraph, 1942
Ink and collage on board
14 x 11 inches
Hieronymi, 1943
Gouache and crayon on Whatman board
22 x 30 inches
The Appetite of a Bird, 1943
Casein and oil on canvas
30 x 36 inches
Black and White Figure, 1947
Oil and enamel on canvas
72 x 36 inches
Spectral, 1943
Oil on linen
26 x 18 inches
Feminine Constellation, 1947
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
Internal Motion, 1943
Oil on canvas
40 x 31 inches
Yellow Light, 1947
Gouache and crayon on paper
22 x 30 inches
The Baby Boy, 1945
Oil on linen
25 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches
Jack In The Box, 1950
Oil on canvas
36 x 48 inches
Untitled, circa 1945
Oil on panel
30 x 22 inches
The Feted Wedding, 1945
Oil on canvas
72 x 48 inches
Evidence of the Obscure, 1946
Shadowbox Ink and Impressionage
11 x 14 inches
Education
1932-34 St. Paul’s School of Art, Minnesota
1934-35 Art Students League, New York (studied under Vaclav Vytlacil)
1935-37 Employed by the WPA/FAP, Mural Division, Minnesota
1937-38 Chicago Bauhaus
1938-40 Hans Hofmann Summer School, Provincetown, Massachusetts
1940 Employed by the WPA/FAP, Mural Division, New York
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1946 New York, Mortimer Brandt Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski.
1948 New York, Betty Parsons Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski
1950 Paris, Galerie R. Creuze, Gerome Kamrowski. New York, Hugo Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski.
1954 Saginaw, Michigan, Saginaw Art Museum, Recent Paintings of Gerome Kamrowski
1956 Battle Creek, Michigan, Battle Creek Civic Art Center, Gerome Kamrowski.
1957 Paris, Galerie R. Creuze, Kamrowski: Oeuvres Recentes.
1961 New York, Gallery Mayer, Paintings on the Surfaces of Domes and Space Grids: Gerome Kamrowski; this exhibition traveled to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art.
New York, Gallery Mayer, Recent Paintings and Paintsemblagers by Gerome Kamrowski.
1978 New York, Monique Knowlton Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1940-47.
1980 Mount Pleasant, Central Michigan University, Gerome Kamrowski: Recent Works on Paper.
1983 Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gerome Kamrowski: A Retrospective Exhibition.
1987 New York, Washburn Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: The 1940's.
1989 New York, Washburn Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: The 1940's.
1996 New York, Washburn Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: The 1940's.
1997 Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, Jean Slusser Gallery, Patterns of Revelation: Gerome Kamrowski's Visual Imperative.
2002 Tarpon Springs, Florida, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Kamrowski: An American Surrealist.
2002-3 Flint, Michigan, Flint Institute of Arts, Gerome Kamrowski: Works on Paper.
2003 Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art, The Worlds of Gerome Kamrowski, Surrealism and Beyond.
2004 New York, Washburn Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: A Memorial.
2005 San Francisco, Weinstein Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: 1940 to 1965, Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism.
2006 San Francisco, Weinstein Gallery, Gerome Kamrowski: 1958 to 2002, Abstract
Selected Public Collections
Albion College, Albion, MI
Ann Arbor District Library, Ann Arbor, MI
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI
Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, CA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI
The University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Worcester Art Museum, Worchester, MA
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
