William Congdon - Biography

Biography

William Grosvenor Congdon was born April 15, 1912 in Providence, Rhode Island into a socially prominent family of New England industrialists. He 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, in 1930 he enrolled at Yale University where he received a B.A. in English in 1934. For four years he studied to become a sculptor in Philadelphia and Boston at one point under the guidance of George Demetrios.

With the U.S. entry into war, Congdon enlisted in the American Field Service and was attached to the British Eighth Army, going through battlefields in Egypt, Libya, Italy and Germany. It was in Germany where he participated in the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen Belsen; he was one of the first Americans to enter the camp and he made drawings which were later reproduced in a book.

After the war, Congdon returned to New York and began to paint, a change in medium for him; his methods were those of the emerging school of Abstract Expressionism such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.

In 1948 he moved back to Italy, ultimately settling in Milan after brief sojourns in Rome, Venice and Assisi. His first New York exhibition was in 1949, at the Betty Parsons Gallery; it sold out. He continued to exhibit with the Parsons Gallery until 1962.

It was during the 1950s in Europe, that his name began to become known and his landscapes deemed a success by critics who recognized his talent; many compared his views with those of J.M.W. Turner. He travelled widely, seeking inspiration for his landscapes to such varied places as Greece, Turkey, France, India and Ceylon.

In 1959, he converted to Catholicism in Assisi and he embarked upon a series of paintings using Old and New Testament themes. In 1964 he attended the Eucharistic Congress in Bombay, traveling there with Pope Paul VI. After the late 1960s, his landscape painting style became increasingly abstract.

In the 1970s he resumed his travels through India, America and the Near East, until he moved in 1979 to Cascinazza (Buccinasco) Benedictine monastery located in the lower Lombard, where he spent his last years, dying of a heart attack on the 15 April 1998; his 86th birthday. His paintings are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and the Benedictine Monastery in Subiaco, Italy.

Paintings :

• Naples Afternoon at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Canal at the The Phillips Collection
• Venice at the The Phillips Collection
• Destroyed City at the Addison Gallery
• Positano at the Addison Gallery
• Positano#1 at the Yale University Art Gallery
• Piazza San Marco at the Yale University Art Gallery
• Italian Moon at the Yale University Art Gallery
• Athens at the Moma
• Eiffel Tower #1, 1955 at the Memorial Art Gallery
• Piazza San Marco at the Kettle's Yard
• Guatemala #7 at the Kettle's Yard
• Canal from Giudecca at the Kettle's Yard
• Indian Temple at the Kettle's Yard
• Indian Temple 2 at the Kettle's Yard
• Moon Night Subiaco at the Kettle's Yard
• Moon Night Subiaco 2 at the Kettle's Yard

What People write about him:

• Clement Greenberg: " Congdon’s subjects are just urban views and buildings and he, following Klee, does not scorn the monotony of their structure. But if the structure is monotonous, the effect is not so. This repetitive all-over composition, without beginning or end, has previously appeared in analytical cubism and more recently in the work of painters like Mark Tobey, Jackson Pollock, and Janet Sobel I am anxious to see what Congdon will do now. My impression is that he is only at the start of the evolution that will decide who he is as a painter. "

• Peggy Guggenheim: "‘William Congdon is the only painter since Turner, who has understood Venice, its mystery, its poetry and its passion. He has a modern way of expressing himself, but his insight is as old as the city itself. He has been able to gather up the emotional essence of many centuries and has melted this vision into such a fantastic and beautiful dream that his paintings leave one breathless They are made of lava; they are blazing; they palpitate with the life and passion of all the Venetians who have long since gone to their final resting places."

• Jacques Maritain : "When I met William Congdon in Paris, what most struck me about him was a strangely deep douceur, a defenseless candor, a vulnerability to any spiritual arrow, either the arrows of the distress of this world and of that beauty which wounds the senses, or the arrows of the supramundane shores. With him, as with Rouault… I felt that astonishing resemblance between the man and the work which is characteristic of genuinely great artists."

• Mazzariol Giuseppe: "The story of a character of extraordinary opportunities, encounters and destiny is fascinating and in telling it the story itself, of a life intensely suffered and expressed, will necessarily affect us and convey to us moments of poetry, adventure, enlightenment and invention However it would be negligence to tell his story before that of his work as a painter, if only because his commitment to painting can be identified with his commitment to life and the forms of his painting themselves contain entire, true and direct, the charge of his existence."

• Giulio Carlo Argan : "I believe Congdon has moved in the opposite direction to that of Gorky. He wanted to translate into our fundamentally – even pathetically - naturalistic European language, the anger of his original rebellion against the uniformity, the regularity, that brand of compulsory optimism which was imposed upon the American society. his contact with Europe, his way of communicating with the humanism of a suffering and moribund Europe, was not only an act of intellectual piety but also an opening toward the future. It was the sun at the end of a tunnel."

• Testori Giovanni: " In Congdon’s Lombardy paintings there is the ability to close and open the liturgical sense and sound of life. And these paintings – for we are talking about painting – are “Longobard” also because they have the magnificence of those ancient jewels: their beauty is such that words should be switched off and one should linger in front of it, and learn from that tight, splendid, secret language of that unexpected and powerful goldsmith of our times that is the last Congdon"

• Selz Peter: " Quite distant in space as well as in his mind, from the changing styles of the art world, he pursued his search and worked in a highly personal style. His recent paintings are no longer fields of action. Stripped of external appearances, Congdon’s paintings are now concise and silent representations whose sensuous surfaces cloak a transcendent presence."

• Licht Fred: " The city as an expression of the totality of human aspirations and illusions, will be central to his art., the war revealed community and individual to have no protective shell. The ruins bore the whole spiritual, political, and biological history of the human race. The architectural motif, the ‘shell’ that humanity has built as a physical and spiritual refuge reveals itself not just as a protective wrapping, but also as a symbol of dignity and mystery."

• Barbieri Giuseppe : "Congdon knew how to ensure that each painting, actually each draft sketch, had an independent irreversible place of “birth”. His paintings are born, as he obsessively repeats, not created. The images are the result of a creatural, not creative, dimension of the artistic act."

• Cacciari Massimo : "William Congdon can be properly understood only by reference to the theory and experience of the icon because the series of his crucifixes are icons, reversed icons on a black base and not on a gold base like the icons from the East. The oriental icon has always been one of triumph, of victory, a promise of a celestial Jerusalem. In contrast, Congdon’s icons start from black and one can feel it, the black table on the background: from the culmination of the kénosis, from the crucifixion itself, one draws out the color."

Museum Reference:

Andover MA., Addison Gallery OF AMERICAN ART

Atlanta GA, THE TEMPLE- HEBREW BENEVOLENT CONGREGATION.

Boston MA, Museum of Fine Arts.

Bristol RI, BRISTOL MUSEUM.

Cedar Falls IA, UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN IOWA, LIBRARY.

Cleveland OH, CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART.

Detroit MI, Detroite Institute OF THE ARTS.

Hartford CT, Wadsworth Atheneum.

New Haven CT, YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY.

Kansas City MO, COLLECTION HALLMARK CARDS INC.

Louisville KY, Speed Art Museum OF ART.

Metropolitan Museum OF ART.

Museum of Modern ArtMoMa.

Whitney museum of modern Art.

Memphis TN, MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART.

New Brunswick NJ, JANE-VOORHEES-ZIMMERLI ART MUSEUM.

Pittsburgh PA, MUSEUM OF THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTE.

Portsmouth RI, PORTSMOUTH PRIORY.

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL of DESIGN.

MUSEUM OF ART, R. I. S. D.

PROVIDENCE COLLEGE.

Rochester NY, Memorial Art Gallery.

Santa Barbara CA, SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART.

South Bend IN, THE SNITE MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME.

Southborough MA, ST. MARK’S COLLEGE PREPARATORY SCHOOL.

St. Louis MO, ST. LOUIS ART MUSEUM.

Syracuse NY, SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY ART COLLECTION, SIMS HALL.

Toledo OH, Toledo Museum.

Tulsa OK, Philbrook Museum of Art.

Urbana-Champaign IL, KRANNERT ART MUSEUM.

Utica NY, MUNSON-WILLIAMS-PROCTOR INSTITUTE.

Phillips Collection (MODERN ART GAL.)

SMITHSONIAN: NATIONAL COLLECTION.

Assisi, Pro Civitate Christiana, Galleria D’Arte Moderna.

Cambridge, England, KETTLE’S YARD COLLECTION (University of Cambridge).

Rome, Italy: MINISTERO DELL’INDUSTRIA DEL COMMERCIO E DEL ARTIGIANATO.

CENTRO STUDI LAZIO.

COLLEZIONE VATICANA D’ARTE RELIGIOSA MODERNA.

Venice, Italy: THE Peggy Guggenheim COLLECTION.

Venezia MUSEO D’ARTE MODERNA.

Viterbo, Italy MUSEO D’ARTE MODERNA.

Persondata
Name	Congdon, William
Alternative names
Short description	American artist
Date of birth	April 15, 1912
Place of birth
Date of death	April 15, 1998
Place of death