Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955) BLACK ART AUCTION

Jonathan Green (b. 1955) BLACK ART AUCTION

© 2024

Jonathan Green, Abstracted Identities Jonathan Green was born on August 9, 1955 in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, the second of seven children. He was raised by his maternal grandmother, Eloise Stewart Johnson, and learned the Gullah dialect and culture of coastal South Carolina. The Gullah are an ethnic group who live predominantly in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. (the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, as well as the Sea Islands). Enslaved people from Central and West Africa had worked on large plantations in these marshy areas and were geographically isolated, developing their own culture and linguistic traditions.

He became interested in art as a student at Beaufort High School. When he graduated he joined the United States Air Force, which allowed him to travel and further his education. Green graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1982 with a BFA degree—making him the first artist of Gullah heritage to receive formal training at this level.

Photo: Jonathan Green Studios, website

His work from the 1980s was influenced by abstraction and cubism, as seen in the works of this collection. Chicago’s art scene has a long history of these aesthetics.

Photo: Jonathan Green with painting, The Expulsion REF: Miles, Stacy. “Young Artist given Key to City.” The Island Packet, 5 July 1985, p. 27.

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

CUBISM LANDED IN CHICAGO LIKE A BOMB. Archipenko’s La Vie Familiale (Family Life) was exhibited in Gallery 53 at the Art Institute of Chicago (1913), in the International Exhibition of Modern Art .

This was informally the “second leg” of the well known Armory Show of 1913 in New York. The response to this show in the generally conservative Midwest was shock. In the book, Art in Chicago, A History from the Fire to Now, Jennifer Jane Marshall describes the mood: The city’s vice commission declared the art no better than what an animal might paint... A high school teacher sought to ban admission to schoolchildren, citing ‘lewd and demoralizing art’... If New Yorkers had been hesitant, Chicagoans appeared downright riotous…

Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), Statuette, 1916.

Lazlo Moholo-Nagy (1895-1946), A19, 1947; Art Institute of Chicago; Image rights: © 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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WHAT HAPPENED IN CHICAGO STAYED IN CHICAGO. A lawyer and art collector named Arthur Jerome Eddy purchased works from the Armory Show in New York and also the Chicago venue. He also lectured twice at the Art Institute on the subject of cubism. In 1931, eleven years after his death, his family donated a number of works from their collection to the Art Institute of Chicago, including purchases he had acquired at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913. This is relevant because these artworks became part of the permanent collection.

THE MODERN VIEW. Photo Credit: Manierre Dawson (1887-1969), Meeting (The Three Graces), 1912; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Gift of Myra Bairstow and Lewis J. Obi, M.D., 2007; Accession Number: 2007.331; Rights and Reproduction: © ObiArts, Inc

In 1912, Chicago’s own Manierre Dawson painted The Three Graces, which now hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Dawson had made a series of works that were cubist reinterpretations of classical and old master works. Marshall writes about Dawson’s response to the International Exhibition of Modern Art : For Dawson, the Armory Show did not represent an expansion of his artistic perspective so much as its confirmation.

‘I had thought of myself as an anomaly’.

‘I had to defend myself many times, as not crazy.’

REF: Taft, Maggie, et al. “Routes to Modernism 1913-1943.” Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2018.

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Cubism met formal abstraction in Chicago with the formation of the New Bauhaus (it later became The Institute of Design) in 1937 by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, who was a teacher alongside Wassily Kandinsky at the original Bauhaus in Germany, but fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s. MoholyNagy invited his colleague Alexander Archipenko to teach there, which he did for two years. The New Bauhaus, similarly to the original, sought to combine fine art and craft and stressed the goal of identifying the ideal form, which would be revealed by utilizing basic geometric structures.

These early 20th century artists, along with the exhibition venues, the schools, and the succession of young artists that followed all influence contemporary artists to this day. It’s not possible to stand on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago, between the lions, and not feel the history of the art and architecture of the city. But these young artists do not all stay in Chicago; they take that experience on to new places—or sometimes back home.

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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When Jonathan Green exhibited in Savannah in 1985 at the King Tisdell Cottage, several works included exemplified that. In an article appearing in the newspaper, The Island Packet (Hilton Head Island), commenting on the exhibition, art critic Stacy Miles writes, “Green’s work is dominated by ‘pseudocubist abstraction’, the reduction of form into geometric shapes and vibrant colors. “ She quotes the artist: “When I meet someone, I see a flat surface. As I gradually get to know him or her better, I extract information which causes the flat surface to take shape. The geometric shapes represent the inner person that I see.”

REF: Miles, Stacy. “Young Artist given Key to City.” The Island Packet, 5 July 1985, p. 27.

It is important to understand that these cubist images are not simply an early, distinct period in the artist’s career; they are part of his evolution that remains fundamental to what has become known as his “Gullah works”. In an article written by Carroll Greene, Jr., Coming Home Again, Artist Jonathan

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Green Returns to his Gullah Roots, this idea is discussed further: “Human figures, which have always been the artist’s favorite subject, are rendered featureless in the Gullah paintings. The viewer is not permitted past the dark oval faces. At first the figures seem to bar introspection, but these featureless persons are not anonymous beings. In their communities they are recognized by, size, shape, stance and gesture, the way one recognizes a familiar person whose back is turned toward you.”

REF: Greene, Jr., Carroll. “Coming Home Again, Artist Jonathan Green Returns to His Gullah Roots .” American Visions, Feb. 1990, p. 44.

Greene includes another quote by the artist related to this: “I enjoy what can be done by abstracting the figures to express subjective emotion through an understandable form.”

The lack of features seems to suggest an archetypical human being and, in this instance, serves to universalize a people in their daily routines and special occasions.

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green’s use of abstraction is counter-intuitive. On one hand, he is lending an identity to a group of people who are under-recognized by making them entirely non-specific. He is essentially saying their basic humanity is exactly identical and equal to everyone else’s: whether a person is Black, white, gay, straight, Gullah or of European origin. He is intentionally not offering the viewer a “first glance” of his figures, because he does not believe it is possible to truly know someone by a quick look. That would inevitably lead to discrimination and inaccurate profiling. Instead, he implies that the effort required to really to know and understand a person is the responsibility of the viewer, and occurs over time.

This is perhaps most evident in his Human Variation Series.

REF: Parker, Adam. “Restless Artistic Temperament Brings Painter Back to Lowcountry Roots.” The Post and Courier, 19 July 2009.

His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including The Morris Museum, Augusta, Georgia; The Afro-American Museum of Philadelphia; The Naples Museum of Art, Naples, Florida; and The IFCC Cultural Center, Portland, Oregon. i

He said he is driven today by two main ideas: To make sure art is ensconced in our community — its public facilities, schools and churches — and to help women understand that they are the “force and guide” ensuring that their children conceive of themselves as free to pursue all opportunities. “No mother would not want her child to have human rights,” Green said. Any mother who fails to stand up for her children — white, black, straight, gay — has abdicated her responsibilities, he said.

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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UNTITLED (Surrealist Scene), 1986 oil on canvas 48-1/2 x 36 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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UNTITLED (Abstracted Figure), 1985 pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

UNTITLED (Abstracted Figure), 1985 pastel on paper 12 x 8 inches signed and dated

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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UNTITLED (Abstracted Figure), 1985 pastel on paper 11-1/2 x 7-1/2 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

UNTITLED (Abstracted Figure), 1985 pastel on paper 12 x 9 inches signed and dated

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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UNTITLED (Standing nude), 1987 mixed media on paper 25 x 19 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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Head of a Woman, 1985 oil on board 12 x 9 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Head of a Woman, 1985 oil on board 14 x 9-1/2 inches signed and dated

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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youth, 1985

oil on board 24-1/2 x 16 inches signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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untitled, Male Figure, 1987

mixed media on illustration board 28 x 20-1/2 inches signed

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

untitled, (abstracted nude), 1985 pastel on board 11 x 7-1/2 inches signed and dated

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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untitled (abstracted figure), 1985

pastel and mixed media on paper 28 x 19-1/2 inchess signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

untitled (abstracted figure), 1985

pastel and mixed media on paper 12 x 8-1/2 inchess signed and dated

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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untitled (NUDE), 1985

pastel and mixed media on paper 27-1/2 x 8-1/2 inchess signed and dated

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Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

Jonathan Green (b. 1955)

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