John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Employing precisely painted rectangular and gridded forms of beige, warm black, marigold yellow, and deep indigo, McLaughlin’s works intended to provoke a meditative state.
Background
John Mclaughlin was born on May 21, 1898, in Sharon, Massachusetts, United States, into the family of John Dwyer and Harriet (Attwood) Mclaughlin. His father was a Massachusetts Superior Court judge and he had six siblings. His parents instilled in him an interest in art, most specifically Asian art. His mother’s uncle, Gilbert Attwood, had a large collection of Japanese objects that he received from the many Japanese students he hosted, and these objects were eventually given to McLaughlin’s mother.
Education
In 1935 John McLaughlin moved to Japan, where McLaughlin studied the art and language. Then he studyed Japanese at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu.
McLaughlin served in both World Wars. His service in the United States Navy during World War I spanned from 1917 to 1921. John had begun painting during the 1930s, relatively late in life. He was self-taught, without receiving formal artistic training. His fondness for Asian art and his travels in that part of the world influenced his artistic style. He also served the United States Marine Corps in World War II as a translator. Later in the war, he worked in U.S. Army Intelligence as a translator in Japan, India, China, and Burma. He settled in Dana Point, California in 1946 and began painting full-time.
A few of his earliest paintings were still lifes and landscapes, but the remainder of his pieces were abstracts. During that time period, he was one of just a few American artists creating abstracts. McLaughlin's work is characterized by a simplicity expressed as precise geometric forms, usually rectangles. His experiences in Asia were very important in developing his style. Zen masters taught that spaces between objects could be more important than the objects themselves in facilitating meditation. The work of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian also strongly influenced McLaughlin. From 1952 onward, he ceased using curves in his work. Paintings from his later period show increasing simplification of form and color palette.
McLaughlin's first solo exhibition was in 1952 at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles. He also showed with André Emmerich in New York and Zurich. His many other museum solo exhibition venues included the Pasadena Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was also included in numerous group exhibitions, including the landmark "Four Abstract Classicists" exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
A touring exhibition "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury" featured the abstract classicists. Life magazine published a special issue in 1962 on the state of California. It highlighted five renowned artists, including John McLaughlin. In 1963, the Pasadena Art Museum exhibited McLaughlin's first major museum retrospective curated by the legendary Walter Hopps. In 1968, the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibited McLaughlin's second major museum retrospective curated by James Hartithas. McLaughlin died on March 22, 1976, in Dana Point at the age of 77.
Achievements
John McLaughlin is regarded as one of the most important American artists of the mid-twentieth century, although his work was widely acknowledged only towards the end of his career and received more attention especially during the past few years. John McLaughlin was best known for his austere geometric abstractions based in the Zen Buddhist notion of the void. He was also considered one of the most significant Californian postwar artists.
McLaughlin created bilateral paintings with symmetry on the left and right sides of the canvas using vertical and horizontal rectangles. His images are characterized by strictly geometric compositions of few color sections. McLaughlin holds a singular position among this group of artists in that his artistic vision is grounded in Zen Buddhist philosophy.
Quotations:
"With respect to my direct influences I must stress my interest in 15th and 16th century Japanese painters. I have found comfort in some aspects of thought expressed by Malevitch, and I am indebted to Mondrian because his painting strongly indicated that the natural extension of Neo-Plasticism is the totally abstract."
Membership
McLaughlin is the most prominent of the “Hard Edge” group of painters of the late 1950s, who formed a counter movement to the emotionally charged Color Field painting of Abstract Expressionism.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Deliberately neutral in character, John McLaughlin's forms might be described as anonymous. Essentially color serves him as a means of defining and regulating a form's relative importance in the composition. Each painting represents the outcome of a process of refinement.
Interests
Asian art
Artists
Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian
Connections
In 1928 John married Florence Emerson, a grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
