Included as one of the “Four Abstract Classicists” in the 1959 exhibition at Los Angeles County Museum of Art that defined Hard Edge painting in Southern California, John McLaughlin, both because of his relative age and long length of his career, can be considered the elder statesman of the movement. Alongside the works of Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, and Frederic Hammersley, McLaughlin’s meditative geometric abstractions were a point from which the artists associated with the later Light and Space movement would draw. Combining a fundamental understanding of European Abstraction with the philosophies of the Far East, McLaughlin effectively freed his paintings from the formal exercises of the former in an effort to “liberate the viewer from the tyranny of the object.”
Details
- Artist Name: John McLaughlin (American, 1898-1976)
- Title: Untitled
- Date: c. 1946
- Medium: Acrylic on board
- Dimensions: 10-3/4 x 12-15/16 in. (27.3 x 32.9 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
- Accession Number: P.1977.03
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Museum
Object Information
Norton Simon, gift 17 May 1977 to;
Norton Simon Museum.
John McLaughlin
- Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1968-11-16 to 1969-01-05
- Humblet, Claudine, La Nouvelle Abstraction Américaine 1950-1970, 2003, Vol. I p. 335
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 75 p. 253
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