William Congdon

William Grosvenor Congdon (April 15, 1912, Providence, Rhode Island – April 15, 1998, Milan) was an American painter who gained notoriety as an artist in New York City in the 1940s, but lived most of his life in Europe.

Biography

Early Life and Education

William Grosvenor Congdon was born on April 15, 1912, in Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A. He was the second child of Gilbert Maurice Congdon and Caroline Rose Grosvenor, who married in 1910. Both parents came from rich families: the Congdons dealt in iron, steel and metals, while the Grosvenors owned a textile manufacturing business in Rhode Island. They had five children, all sons. William Congdon was the cousin of Isabella Stewart Gardner (the American, poet-critic Allen Tate's second wife) who is spoken of in personal letters between Allen Tate and Jacques Maritain. (see pages 77–79 in John M. Dunaway's Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon.) After graduating from St. Mark’s School of Southborough, Massachusetts, Congdon studied English Literature at Yale University and graduated in 1934. His only close relationships outside the immediate family were with a cousin on his mother’s side - the future poet Isabella Gardner - and with a fellow student at Yale, Tom Blagden. For three years, Congdon took painting lessons in Provincetown with Henry Hensche, followed by a further three years of drawing and sculpture lessons with George Demetrios in Boston and then Gloucester. From the former, Congdon learned the need to seize the deep form of things, an immediate and yet mysterious process in which color predominated over line, in which there was a radical attachment to the objectivity of things; from the latter, he learned fluidity of outline, respect for the inner energy of each form and, at the same time, a substantial rejection of any type of purely abstract language. For some months in 1934-35 he frequented the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Early career

Apart from a few small paintings of islands and boats - a theme he would continue to explore right up to the last months of his life – Congdon’s first works were sculptures: these are primarily portraits - very expressive works for which he received a number of commissions - and groups of animals. However, there is no doubt that travel and the discovery of Europe were the key influences in the 1930s on him. Together with Tom Blagden and sister, he was in Spain in 1936 and with the outbreak of the Civil War they simply changed itinerary and made for Southern France, passing on to Paris and then Mont St. Michel. The trips to Europe were also a step towards overcoming the limits of an artistic tradition that was necessarily provincial. The great Spanish School inspired his passion for color and for dark backgrounds, while other “forebears” included the more isolated figures of Impressionism (for example, Edgar Degas), Fauvism (but more Dufy than Matisse), and the humorist Paul Klee.

World War II

When America entered the Second World War, Congdon, on 20 April 1942, signed a one-year contract as a volunteer ambulance driver with the American Field Service (in the end, he would serve a total of three years). Congdon served with the British 9th Army in Syria, and with the British 8th Army in North Africa (El Alamein), Italy (where he took part in the Battle of Montecassino) and Germany: as a member of the C Platoon of AFS567 (Coy) he was one of the first Americans to enter the Nazi death camp of Bergen Belsen. Apart from a few brief visits to the United States, he used all his leave during this period to visit cities, art monuments and exhibitions (he himself would organize a ceramics exhibition in Faenza in March 1945). During the war, Congdon made drawings of the people and places he encounters and recorded his experiences in a diary and in letters to his parents.. The interest in people that had been clear in his pre-war sculptural portraits, now extended to cover the range of human life (and death): the ruins of Frankfurt or an SS ballroom converted into a field hospital became for Congdon settings expressive of a humanity that needed to live together, striving to protect itself from outside aggression, and yet contained an evil that might lead the entire world to destroy itself. His long slow advance up through Europe strengthened his conviction that there was an irreparable rift between the way Europeans and Americans saw life, between the values they adopted, the meaning they read into history. His main criticism of his fellow Americans was that they had failed to understand how the war had so blatantly revealed the failure of a system of values to which he believed it was impossible to return. Only a few months after his return to the United States, he left again for Italy, as a volunteer with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee to help rehabilitate the most stricken areas, distributing aid to war victims and rebuilding villages in Molise.

Maturity: New York

Congdon went to live in New York in February 1948, renting a room on Stanton Street in the Bowery. From this point up, cities would become a leitmotif of his painting; the city was seen as the setting of history, as the site of social tensions and dramas. The first depictions of New York - crumbling façades of cheap buildings, jittery, nervously-penned windows that offer no dominant perspective over a heaving urban magma - seem to reflect the same moral criticism that can be seen in his war drawings. However, this is not all there is to be seen in his various New York paintings. When at the beginning of the summer he moved to a thirtieth-floor apartment overlooking Park Avenue, his point of view on the city necessarily changed. Now his eye could embrace the place as a whole and alongside the moral condemnation emerged a more lyrical perception, as one can see so clearly in a work like View of New York City. Thanks to the eruption onto the scene of a whole new generation of “American” artists – Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart – the city now had an artistic culture that was as stimulating as that of Paris in the 1920s. Through his frame-maker, Leo Robinson, Congdon met Betty Parsons, whose gallery - after Peggy Guggenheim’s “The Art of This Century gallery” closed down - had become one of the prime venues for the promotion of the New York School. Congdon began his almost-twenty-year association with the gallery with his first one-man show in May 1949, on the occasion of which he met most of the leading artists of the day, forming particularly close links with Richard Pousette-Dart and Mark Rothko. In 1950 Congdon exhibited at the Betty Parsons Gallery with Clyfford Still, and in 1951 he exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1952 he exhibited at Duncan Phillips Gallery ^[1] with Nicolas de Staël, and his work was also featured in exhibitions at the Whitney and the Art Institute of Chicago. Even though clearly influenced by Pollock’s drip technique and by the work of Klee - as the famous critic Clement Greenberg would point out in 1949 ^[2] - the “Cities” mark an original contribution to American figurative art; however, the only sign of hope within them is that a snuffed-out sun which hangs indifferently over the scrambling life of the city also stands as a symbol of continuity into the future. At the same time, the city as depicted by Congdon is so frenetic that it seems to suggest a magma of life that is the common root of all humanity.

Maturity: Venice

In the 1950s Congdon was recognized as one of the leading painters in the United States and quickly attained an international reputation as an Abstract Expressionist. In 1951 Time magazine published a long article on him,^[3] and his works were selling well, attracting the attention of major museums. But once again he turned his back on his homeland to go and live in Italy, mainly in Venice, where he befriended Peggy Guggenheim who became a passionate collector of his paintings. He chose at this point to take on the challenge of painting a very special type of “landscape.” The term for Congdon came to represent the space of humankind, nature bearing the signs of human life. He sought out roots that provided him with a reassuring sense of scale. It is no coincidence that his travels took him to some of the most self-evident grandeurs of the world: the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Erechtheion, the palaces of Venice, St Mark's Basilica, the Greek islands, the African desert, the temples of the Orient. During the 1950s Congdon travelled extensively, but Venice was the city he chose as his home for most of this time. He had already been there as a boy, with his mother and brother, and even then had seen the place as the ultimate capital of romanticism, the revelation of the fragility of beauty in time. He himself would admit in the early 1960s that his return there after the tragedies of the war and his rejection of the “American dream” involved a complete rejection of “the material”. He was searching for a world made entirely of images, something to compensate him for the evils of history; and Venice, where history seemed to have completed its course, appeared to be just that - an unchanging mystery. In Venice, Congdon was brought into contact with the great Venetian tradition that runs from Vittore Carpaccio to Francesco Guardi; and at the same time, he saw how modern painters – from J. M. W. Turner to [Claude Monet]- had rendered this incomparable subject. The quality of his St. Mark’s Squares, his Palazzi, his views of the less usual sights of Venice was soon recognized in America. The ten-year relationship with Venice was interrupted on occasions; suddenly the city would cease to reveal itself to the artist, and the need to travel would make itself felt again.

Religious Conversion

In 1959, after a trip to Cambodia, Congdon returned to Assisi(Italy), where he was baptized in the Catholic faith at the Pro Civitate Christiana. Congdon who had often gone back to Assisi during his travels, would write repeatedly about how, admiring and depicting the Franciscan landscape, he had uncovered the bone of his own existence; how he had learned the truth of certain values and the confidence to see himself as he was. The origins of his conversion lie in a series of meetings with the founder of Pro Civitate Christiana, Fr Giovanni Rossi - meetings that would then be followed by others with Jacques Maritain and Thomas Merton. The comparison he saw between his own experience and the life of God made Man can help understand the religious paintings that, as a neophyte, he so enthusiastically undertook in the first years after his baptism. These works show Congdon returning to the problems posed by the depiction of the human figure, something he had tackled in his sculptures and in numerous war drawings; there is also a return to an expressionistic use of color, given that he now had to depict subjects which he could not observe directly; the end result of this chromatic expressionism was a vast increase in the range of his palette. In 1961 Congdon’s work was included in the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition 20th Century American Painting. In 1962 the book In My Disc of Gold, an account of Congdon’s spiritual and artistic life, was published both in Italy and in the USA, and an exhibition of his work was held in Milan. Two years later, his paintings were exhibited in the Vatican Pavilion of the 1964 New York World's Fair. 1962 was a crucial year in Congdon’s new life: in the spring he went to visit Subiaco (Italy) and the monasteries overlooking the Aniene valley, near Rome (one of these, the old Benedictine hermitage of Beato Lorenzo, would the following year be appointed as a summer studio used by Congdon and other artists). By now the painter was living in Assisi, where he remained almost permanently up to 1979 and beyond - though there were still periods of travel, and an interlude in Milan (from 1966 to 1968), where the painter opened a studio. That visit to the area by the end of May produced a series of paintings. This is a particularly important because, after a long period of paintings dedicated to exclusively religious subjects, it marked the artist’s return to his more habitual repertoire of images; however, at the same time, it also showed how he had transfigured the notion of “landscape”.

The Representation of the Crucifix

Even after returning to landscape painting, until 1980 Congdon continued his artistic reflection on the theme of the Cross. Over two decades, there were developments and changes in the handling of this subject. Putting things very simply, one might identify the following phases. In the first works, the influence of the traditional iconography for such paintings clearly makes itself felt: the arms are shown forming a T or Y; the figure is light-colored; background tends to be dark; and the palette reveals some hint of realism (some trace of red, a mixture of black and ochre for the hair, with the occasional presence of gold). By the mid-60s, the realism in the depiction of the whole human figure was beginning to disappear, with the torso or arms just hinted at; this effect of zooming in on the head created a structural parallel with the form of a landscape (the two arms of Christ marking a sort of horizon). The journeys to India of 1973 and 1975 brought about another change, with Congdon drawing inspiration from the rag-clad wretches abandoned in the streets of Kolkata (at the time, Calcutta), stunted human larvae without arms or legs. The last traces of physiognomy, which are still recognizable in Crucifix 64, disappeared altogether in the two seminal large-scale works, n. 90 and n. 91, painted in 1974. The cocooned figures turn into flows of paint; they absorb both the human larvae and the streets on which they are laid out. In these slanting totems, it is no longer possible to clearly distinguish the vertical axis from the horizontal. At the end of the 1970s there was a further rarefaction in Congdon’s treatment of the theme: the body became one with the upright of the Cross, and - with the exception of the occasional intimate gleam of color - the entire palette of the previous works was overwhelmed by black.

New Season of Travel

Travel was a way of extending his visual experience, of nourishing his art. With the exception of some important European trips (the Aeolian islands, Spain, Greece), most of Congdon’s travelling during the 1970s took him far afield (air travel had replaced the liners of his youth). He visited North West Africa, Ethiopia, the Near and Middle East (from Turkey to the Yemen) and South America. There was also a change in his eye: if before he was looking for the monumental sites or the extremes of nature, he now looked at the world with the eye of an unassuming chronicler, someone moved by pity for what he saw, and depicted petrol tankers, the House of Slaves (Gorée) near Dakar, the trains in Tunisia, the houses in Sana’a. This different approach to the sites of the world is most fully revealed by the two trips to India in 1973 and 1975: his contemplation of the people of Mumbay (formerly Bombay) and Kolkata would not only result in some of his most important work, but would also profoundly affect his meditations on the depiction of the crucified Christ.

Late Period: Lombardy

In the fall of 1979 Congdon moved his studio to an apartment adjacent to the Benedictine monastery Comunità Ss. Pietro e Paolo (Community of the Saints Peter and Paul) in Cascinazza, in the Milanese countryside of Gudo Gambaredo (Italy), where he would live for the rest of his life. He was aware that this was the last decisive move of his career; there would be no more travelling to far-flung places. Nevertheless, he did not see this new home as a calm anchorage, a serene recompense after years of unrest. At first, he was more than diffident towards his own “promised land”, but a few years later, the placid Lombardy plain, its florid meadows, the stark outline of its farmhouses, its low foggy sky, all found a vertical elevation in his paintings; they became the new points of reference for his imagination. Congdon now had to tackle a sky and earth that never seemed to change, that seemed the permanent heralds of death. In his diary he wrote that it was like going into exile from all that had previously supported, comforted, flattered and inspired him. In effect the demanding and unavoidable engagement with the land and the rhythm of the seasons had precise and decisive effects upon his art. From the early 1980s onwards, his draftsmanship became less taut, his paint less thick, his colors more sharply divided. While never totally denying a basis in naturalistic perception, the works of this new phase in his art reveal a greater degree of abstraction. Congdon died on April 15, 1998, his 86th birthday. He painted up to a few days before his death. Painting was his life; he could not have lived without expressing what he looked upon as a gift received, that ability to use color and form to depict the world as he saw it. The palette range in his last painting reveals unusual combinations and contrapositions: for example, the sky in his very last work - Three Trees - is a startling innovation.

Critical Rediscovery

Even after his conversion to Catholicism, Congdon still had some opportunities to exhibit his work, both in Italy and in the United States. His last one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery was held in 1967. This date should be considered alongside the general unease felt in American intellectual circles at his conversion; with very few exceptions, critical attention to his work rapidly ceased, and the artist was left for dead in Assisi, a professional suicide. The 1962 exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milano did not change things; nor did the two Galleria Cadario exhibitions (in Rome and Milan) in 1969. A change - though only a partial change - in this situation became apparent in the early 1980s. In 1980 a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Rimini, Italy, during the first Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples. In 1981 a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, in Ferrara, revived public interest in Congdon’s career. Congdon’s “re-appearance” on the scene was further helped by the creation, in October 1980, of a Foundation designed to promote knowledge and study of the artist’s work. Since 1980, there has been no falling-off in this renewed critical attention to his work: important exhibitions in Europe (Como, 1983; Ferrara, 1986; Milan, 1990 and 1992; Faenza, 1995; Bologna, 1996; Madrid 1998; Bassano del Grappa, 1999; Buccinasco, 2000), catalogues, essays, conferences and studies (in particular those by Fred Licht and Peter Selz) opened the way to a return of Congdon’s work to the United States: Providence 2001and New Haven 2012. In 2012 the Ca' Foscari University of Venice organized the first exhibition focusing on Congdon’s works of his Venetian period to take place in Venice.

Painting Technique

Oil paints

Throughout his career and as long as he had the strength, Congdon put his entire self into the work, in the smells, the incisions, the scrapings of medium across the hard board. His use of materials and on the painting’s surface indicate that his early training in sculpture never left him. He applied oil paints on a prepared – often black - board with masonry tools, palette knives, awls and spatulas, as well as large brushes, practically until the end of his life. Finally, in some cases, he would blow gold or silver powder on to the wet paint. In his later years, he forged a singular approach to painting that incorporated the physicality and spontaneity of action painting into forms of figuration and landscape.

“Drawing with paint”: Pastels

In the last fifteen years of his life, besides painting with oils, Congdon did an increasing number of works on paper, using pastels. The expression “Drawing with paint” is the one Congdon himself used in September 1982 to announce his use of what for him was a new medium (pastels are in fact, a sort of pencil made of paint). The artist had been struck by the opportunities offered by this instrument, which served not only in the making of preliminary sketches for paintings but also to summarize a feeling, to enable him to fix his gaze on a particular site or situation. The technique also enabled him to continue creating images even after he had undergone a delicate hip operation. Given the use of this medium, it is no coincidence that the works of those few months reveal a greater complexity, with a more markedly naturalistic rendition of detail. With time, as Congdon perfected his mastery of this new expressive language, there was a gradual rarefaction of the sign, with a few carefully calibrated pencil strokes against a black or white background.

The William G. Congdon Foundation

Established in 1980, the foundation bears Congdon’s name only since his death in 1998. Created at the artist’s behest, the foundation has the task of enhancing and communicating the significance of his work, by cataloguing his figurative and literary production and organizing exhibitions and other events. Since its creation, the foundation has gradually become the custodian responsible for the maintenance and care of Congdon’s paintings, drawings and other artistic works. Through progressive acts of donations - and ultimately through his last will and testament - the artist’s private collection has become the William. G. Congdon Foundation Collection - the property of the Foundation, which manages it in accordance with its own statutory purposes and aims.

Notes

^ Leslie Judd Portner, “Art in Washington”, Washington Post, May 18, 1952
^ Greenberg, Clement, “Art” , ‘’The Nation’’ May 28, 1949, p.621
^ Seiberling, D. and Hunt, G., “William Congdon, a Remarkable New U.S. Painter is Sudden, Remarkable Success”. ‘’Life’’, April 30, 1951, pp.108-111

References

Balzarotti, R. and Barbieri, G. William Congdon. An American Artist in Italy, Vicenza, 2001 – ISBN 88-87760-25-X Balzarotti, R., Licht, F., Selz, P. William Congdon, Milano 1995 –ISBN 88-16-60166-3 Galli, S. From New York to Bergen Belsen: William Congdon’s Pacifist Mission Between Ethics and Politics – S.F. Vanni New York, 2006