Background
Myron Stout was born on December 5, 1908 in Denton, Texas, United States, into the family of Myron Stedman and Alberta (Inge) Stout.
North Texas State University
Columbia University
1952
Hans Hofmann School of Art
North Texas State University
Columbia University
Myron Stout was born on December 5, 1908 in Denton, Texas, United States, into the family of Myron Stedman and Alberta (Inge) Stout.
During his senior year at North Texas State University, Myron decided to become a painter. Then he attended Academy of San Carlos until 1933 and received Master of Arts at Columbia University. In 1946 he began studies with Hans Hofmann.
Myron Stedman Stout worked as a teacher and spent part of his time painting landscapes, none of which are known to survive. Stout spent much of his career in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His first visit was during the summer of 1938. After military service in World War II, he resumed painting with renewed commitment. Stout's works of the period during 1947 – 1952 show the influence of European geometric painting, and typically feature multiple intersecting vertical and horizontal bands of color. After 1950, single forms rather than patterns dominated some of his paintings.
In 1952 Stout relocated to Provincetown. In the autumn of that year his readings of Greek mythology, especially the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, inspired a new direction in his art. Working in black and white, usually on a small scale, he painted flat monolithic shapes which often resembled forks, shields, or lyres.
Stout worked slowly and crafted his images with great care. He had an independent income and was not concerned with selling his work. His mature work has been described by Hilton Kramer as "a mode of abstraction small in scale, purist in form and intimate in feeling — an art utterly devoid of expressionist bravura and emotional display."
Although Myron rarely exhibited, in 1954 he displayed charcoal drawings and paintings at the Stable Gallery in New York, and in 1957 he showed at the Hansa Gallery in New York. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. Stout had a retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1977, and a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980. Myron Stout died of lung cancer in Chatham, Massachusetts in 1987.
Quotations: "When I start drawing, I work with the black and white areas as well as their enclosing lines. Jogging them back and forth. Feeling my way. Pushing a black area up. Starting out with a black area across the bottom… I erase and mark out, and shift without actual drawing, more like in the painting process. So actually, I work both ways in drawing — both in the linear way and in the more painterly way of working with areas, in masses of black and white."
Quotes from others about the person
The power of his paintings lies in their hovering quality of irresolution (without exactly fixed boundaries) within the resolution, their power first to disturb and then to soar and to remain aloft in our imagination. Their staying power once grasped, is their most remarkable quality.
