Gregory Gillespie

by Abram Lerner

"Gregory Gillespie is unique among the younger generation of American painters," Abram Lerner, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, tells us. "Few artists have been so bold in renouncing the formulas of current fashion or have fought so zealously to recapture the drama of the subject in art." And in the opinion of a noted art critic, John Canaday, Gillespie "might just emerge as the most important American painter at work today." Gillespie's highly personal art was previously known mainly to fellow artists, collectors, and some critics. With this volume—a fully illustrated and definitive record of the artist's first museum retrospective exhibition— Gillespie's work is brought to a wide audience for the first time. Mr. Lerner organized the exhibition, which was conceived to trace the development of Gillespie's painting from his early visionary works to the larger-scale works of the mid-1970s, marked by extreme realism and compulsive clarity of detail. Born in Roselle Park, New Jersey, in 1936, Gillespie studied at Cooper Union in New York and at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1962 he was awarded the first of two Fulbright-Hays grants to study in Italy. After two years in Florence, and with the support of three consecutive Chester Dale Fellowships, he worked in Rome for six more years. The effect of Italy is explicit in Gillespie's early paintings. He absorbed the works of Masaccio, Carlo Crivelli, and the sixteenth-century Venetian colorists. Stronger than any direct reference to particular masters, however, is the mood and feel of the ambience of contemporary Italy. An even greater empathy may have existed between Gillespie's essentially romantic sensibility and that of the German and Flemish old masters. The sharpness of detail, sensuous color, and dramatic emphasis in his paintings have elements in common with works by Grünewald, Bruegel, and Bosch.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1979