Arts and Letters

My friendship with Balcomb Greene began when he returned to New York from Paris in 1933. But I must mention his background which so uniquely formed the artist that he became. He was born in 1904 in Niagara Falls. His father was a minister and he contemplated being one himself. However, he took a different direction entirely, going to Syracuse University and majoring in philosophy. During his senior year he met Gertrude Glass, a sculptor. They were married in 1927 and went to Vienna where Balcomb continued his studies in philosophy and attended lectures by Sigmund Freud. After they returned to New York, he got a job teaching English at Dartmouth. Under the influence of Gertrude, they returned to Paris in 1931 and Balcomb began to paint (without instruction) at La Grande Chaumiere. By 1933, they had returned to New York and Balcomb was painting, a strange mixture of realism, cubism, and totemistic influences. I lived around the corner from the Greenes in Greenwich Village. We became very good friends and shared an interest in abstract art which was not exactly popular then. There was the Gallery of Living Art assembled at New York University by Albert E. Gallatin, on Washington Square. At first a small group of artists used to meet at different studios to discuss the latest developments in art. In the original group was Albert S. Swinden, Alice Mason, Byron Brown, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, and myself, but later George L. K. Morris, Albert E. Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky, among others, joined us.

This group soon formed the "American Abstract Artists." We had our first exhibit about 1935. A large exhibit in the Squib Gallery in 1938 attracted a review in the New York Post where the art critic wrote: "Nothing will ever come of this."

Oddly, Balcomb was the leading voice for strict observance of abstraction. No artist was admitted whose work contained figurative elements. Balcomb insisted that any recognizable elements spoiled the work's integrity.

For most artists, those were difficult times. Few artists even dreamt of selling anything. The Red Cross distributed cartons of food, beans, cereals, and other canned food. Once a week Balcomb and I went to the Red Cross Depot and picked up our supplies.

By 1942 Balcomb was teaching art history at Carnegie Institute of Technology where he remained until 1959. His turn away from abstraction was very unexpected. I knew he had a great admiration for the human figure, especially the female. He also had a keen interest in the erotic and made many photographs of the female nude. Even though he once said that Mondrian was the greatest painter of his time, he had to follow his own muse which led him back to the human figure. Instinctively, he resisted prevailing pressures to change his ideas. His painting became more romantic and impressionistic. Later, he became inspired by the beautiful landscapes and seascapes visible from his home on top of a bluff overlooking the ocean near Montauk Point where he lived most of the time with Terryn Trimten, whom he married in 1961. The house which he built almost entirely by himself is a work of art—an elegant monument to Balcomb Greene. I will close by quoting Balcomb: "I claim no achievement save my recognition that the situation of mankind is so perilous that the future of art, as a separate and unrelated activity, is unimportant."