William Grosvenor Congdon was an American painter. The artist was associated with the style of Abstract Expressionism and was known for his depiction of religious themes.
Background
Congdon was born in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, on April 15, 1912. He was the second child of Gilbert Maurice Congdon and Caroline Rose Grosvenor, who got married in 1910. Both parents came from wealthy families: the Congdons dealt with steel, iron, and metals, while the Grosvenors were the owners of a textile manufacturing business in Rhode Island.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was William Congdon's cousin, a second wife of an American poet-critic Allen Tate. William Congdon had five brothers, including Johns H., Robert G. and Theodore G. Congdon.
Education
William Congdon graduated from St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts. He studied English Literature at Yale University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1934. For some months during 1934-1935, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Beginning from 1934, Congdon took painting lessons in Provincetown, studying under Henry Hensche for three years; it was followed by a further three years of drawing and sculpture lessons with George Demetrios in Boston and then Gloucester.
Career
When the United States entered World War II, Congdon signed a one-year contract, becoming a volunteer ambulance driver of the American Field Service on April 20, 1942. William Congdon served with the British 9th Army in Syria, and with the British 8th Army in North Africa, Italy and Germany.
During the war, William Congdon produced drawings of the people and places he met and recorded his experiences in a diary; later all those materials were used to produce a book. A few months after his return to the United States, he moved to Italy, becoming a volunteer of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee. Its goal was to help rehabilitate the most troubled areas, assisting to war victims and rebuilding villages in Molise.
Congdon returned to the United States, settling in New York, in February 1948. There he rented a cold-water studio on the Bowery in New York and started to paint, a change of media that he called his ''first conversion." From now onwards, cities would become a leitmotif of his oeuvre; the city was seen as the centre of history, as the place of social tensions and dramas. He neglected brushes preferring poured paint, gold dust, slashing strokes made with a spatula and surfaces scratched with nails - a step in the direction of Abstract Expressionists.
William Congdon held his first one-man show in May 1949, during which he met most of the leading artists of the day, forming particularly close relations with Richard Pousette-Dart and Mark Rothko. In 1950 Congdon displayed his artworks at the Betty Parsons Gallery together with Clyfford Still, and in 1951 the painter exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1952 he had a joint exhibition with Nicolas de Staël at Duncan Phillips Gallery, and his works were also presented at exhibitions at the Whitney and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 1951 a long article was published on him in Time magazine and his paintings were sold well, attracting the attention of major museums. By then, Mr. Congdon had returned to Italy, living first in Rome, then Venice, Assisi and Milan. While in Venice, he befriended Peggy Guggenheim who became a collector of his paintings.
During the 1950s Congdon travelled widely, seeking and finding inspiration in scenes of Athens and Istanbul, and in Indian temples, French cathedrals as well as Italian and Ceylonese landscapes. In 1959, after a trip to Cambodia, William Congdon returned to Assisi, Italy.
William Congdon's works were included in the Smithsonian Institution’s travelling exhibition 20th Century American Painting in 1961. In 1962 In My Disc of Gold, a book about art and his religious conversion was published both in Italy and in the United States, and an exhibition of his oeuvre was held in Milan. Two years later, his works were showed in the Vatican Pavilion of the 1964 New York World's Fair.
After the late 1960s, the painter focused on increasingly abstract renderings of landscapes. The journeys to India of 1973 and 1975 brought about another change, with Congdon finding inspiration in the rag-clad wretches abandoned in the streets of Calcutta, stunted human larvae without arms or legs.
In the autumn of 1979, Congdon moved his studio to an apartment near 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 remained for the rest of his life. The most recent monograph on Congdon's work was published in 1995 in English and Italian with essays written by Peter Selz and Fred Licht.
In the last fifteen years of his life, besides painting with oils, William Congdon produced plenty of artworks 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.
Religion
William Congdon was received into the Roman Catholic faith at the Pro Civitate Christiana in 1959.