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John Grillo
American Abstract-Expressionism Painting
American
(Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1917 – 2014)


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Biography

John Grillo was an early and influential member of the San Francisco school of abstract expressionism1 that centered around the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) following World War II; art historian Thomas Albright has called him “probably the earliest and purest of the school’s action painters.”2 In many respects Grillo’s work was visionary. Prior to the rise of the New York school of abstract painters, he produced abstract expressionist works while stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, at the California School of Fine Arts, he explored complete abstraction, automatic painting, and drip and splatter techniques. It is a little-known fact that he was making these explorations at the same time as Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, and Jackson Pollock, but well before he had any knowledge of their work—yet another example of the zeitgeist of abstraction that occurred in the United States and Europe following World War II.

Grillo studied at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, where he received a degree in 1938. Six years later, he was drafted into the navy, all the while documenting his experience in sketches that showed the influence of his social realist art school instruction. During his service in Okinawa, however, he “broke away from representation,”3 recalling his attraction to the work of Salvador Dalí and the surrealists he had seen in New York in the early 1940s. His paintings incorporated unconventional found materials such as cocoa and coffee grounds, and became very loose and abstract, capturing the precarious nature of wartime soldiering.4

After his discharge in 1946, Grillo disembarked in San Francisco. Armed with the financial support of the GI Bill and a “folio of tattered paintings made overseas,”5 he presented himself to Douglas MacAgy, the director of the California School of Fine Arts. Grillo’s work immediately impressed MacAgy, who later wrote, “These fragments expressed the searching experience of an individual in the hand of war.”6 Grillo was accepted on the spot and offered his own studio, where he continued to explore abstract painting independently of classroom instruction. Artist John Hultberg recalled watching him paint—he would “stand back about three feet and throw paint at the canvas and let it drip.”7 Grillo’s loose style and risk-taking approach to painting influenced other students and instructors alike, including Richard Diebenkorn.

Although Grillo’s stated aim was to “develop original work without any influences other than self-expression,”8 many of his abstract expressionist paintings contain unmistakable references to natural and human forms. Untitled (1948) gives the impression of a distant horizon line and a foreground populated with surreal figures, boxes, and sticklike constructs. The artist has allowed dark moments to collect in the painting—the muddy foreground, the darkening “sky” over the horizon, the black and olive green foreground forms—but he has balanced the darkness with traces of optimism in the totemic figures, with cadmium yellow and incised white highlights, an abundance of transparent cobalt blue washes, and milky crescent forms gesturing upward. Grillo’s forms may suggest human figures, primitive sculptures, searchlights, parachutes or other objects, but one would be hard-pressed to derive any clarity of meaning from them. This conscious ambiguity can be attributed to what art historian Susan Landauer calls his “reluctance to freeze shapes by static contours. Edges are blurred, and the paint is allowed to drip and run in intuitive meanderings.”9

Although Untitled was painted after Grillo had left for New York, it exhibits the best qualities of the San Francisco school. It is painted in a loose and spontaneous manner, its forms naturally and organically inspired, delicately expressing both the freedom and the angst of a GI returned from war. John Grillo would move on toward a full and varied artistic and teaching career, but this painting marks what is arguably one of the richest periods in his artistic production—an important moment when his artistic maturity meshed with and influenced a movement. —M.H.S.

1. Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
2. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 39.
3. Mary Fuller McChesney, A Period of Exploration, San Francisco, 1945–1950, exh. cat. (Oakland, Calif.: The Oakland Museum, 1973), 54.
4. Susan Landauer, John Grillo: The San Francisco Years 1946–1947, exh. cat. (San Francicso: The Carlson Gallery, 1990), 9.
5. Douglas MacAgy, “Grillo,” exh. announcement (New York: The Artist’s Gallery, 1948).
6. Ibid.
7. Mary Fuller “Was there a San Francisco School?” Artforum, January 1971, 51.
8. John Grillo, application for the Abraham Rosenberg Fellowship, 18 March 1947, Papers of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library, San Francisco Art Institute.
9. Landauer, John Grillo, 11.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Biography below on Artnet link from the John Grillo wepage: http://www.johngrillo.net/
John Grillo (American, b.1917) is a painter, sculptor, and lithographer. He was born in Lawrence, MA, and studied at the Hartford School of Fine Arts from 1935 to 1938. He relocated to San Francisco, CA, and attended the California School of Fine Arts from 1945 to 1947. In 1948, he returned to Massachusetts and studied under Hans Hofmann (German/American, 1880–1966) at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown. Grillo’s first exhibition was held at Daliel's Gallery in Berkeley, CA, in 1947, and in the following year, his second solo exhibition was held in New York at the Artists' Gallery. In 1952, Grillo had his third solo exhibit at Tanager Gallery in New York, and in 1953, three other New York galleries showcased his work: the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Grillo was a visiting artist at the University of California at Berkeley, Iowa University, Studio School of New York, and Illinois University at Carbondale. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New School of Social Research in New York, the Pratt Institute, the University of Massachusetts and Provincetown Art Association, and Museum in Provincetown, MA. Grillo has also won several awards, including First Prize in Oil Painting and a prize for best sculpture at the Wistariahusrt Museum in Holyoke, MA. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Katherina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York, the Cove Gallery in Wellfleet, MA, the Aaron Galleries Modern in Chicago, Robert Green Fine Arts in Mill Valley, CA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York, and the Stable Gallery in New York.

Grillo’s work can be found in public collections at The University of Texas Museum, Dartmouth College, the Bundy Art Gallery Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Portland Museum, the University of Massachusetts, and the Norfolk Museum in Virginia. The artist currently resides in Provincetown, MA.

Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1917, John Grillo attended the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco from 1946-1947. The following three years he studied with Hans Hoffman in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Throughout the 1960s he held several teaching positions as a visiting artist and as a painting instructor. From1967-1991 he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1995 he worked as a painting and drawing instructor at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Grillo’s work has been exhibited at various galleries and museums including Robert Greene Fine Arts, Mill Valley; Hampden Gallery, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; the Oakland Museum of California Art; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the British Museum, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., among others. These will be the first two works by Grillo to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)


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