Thomas George: A Retrospective
Princeton University Art Museum
June 25 - September 11, 2005
In 2003, longtime Princeton resident Thomas George gave to the Princeton University Art Museum thirty-seven works spanning a fifty-year period so that people interested in his art might find a representative selection of it in one place. To celebrate this gift, which adds significantly to other works by Thomas George acquired previously, the museum presents the exhibition Thomas George: A Retrospective.
Consisting largely of selections from the permanent collection, together with two sketchbooks and a recent ink-and-wash drawing on loan from the artist, the exhibition covers a wide range of media and techniques.
“The twenty-five works emphasize both change and continuity in George’s artistic development, and the integral role played by nature in his pursuit of a uniquely abstract language,” said Laura Giles, curator of prints and drawings, who organized the exhibition.
Born in New York City in 1918, Thomas George graduated from Dartmouth College in 1940, and served in the United States Navy in World War II, drawing terrain maps used in coastal invasions. After the war he studied art in Paris and Florence on the G.I. Bill, a period represented in the exhibition by two portraits of Gino, a fellow student at the Art Academy in Florence.
Although Thomas George has continued with figurative drawings in his sketchbooks, his great interest has been landscape—mountains, sea, sky, trees, and gardens—which he has observed, described, and evoked in various locations throughout the world.
In the mid-1950s he moved with his family to Japan to study traditional brush painting, a technique he subsequently adapted in his calligraphic views of the dramatic mountainous landscape of the Lofoten Islands, Norway, which he first visited in 1966, and of the limestone peaks of Guilin, China, where he spent five weeks in 1974 and 1976 (becoming one of the first Western artists permitted to work in mainland China after 1949).
Beginning in the late 1950s he had a series of one-man exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, where his abstract oil paintings reflect what Thomas George has described as “my goal to create a ‘new reality’ from what I see and feel.”
In 1969 Thomas George moved to Princeton, where he has been particularly inspired by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study. He made over one hundred pastels there between 1984 and 1996—always noting the time of day, usually early morning or early evening, as a record of the angle and color of the light. Two of these pastels are in the exhibition, along with three earlier, shimmering examples from 1983, created in what George has described as his “color laboratories” (Monet’s garden at Giverny, and the Welsh garden of Bodnant), where he could teach himself to think and speak more fluently and expressively in color.
In a subsequent series of vibrant watercolors executed in 1998 in New Mexico, three of which are on view, Thomas George found the answer to uniting the two dominating impulses in his work—black-and-white, and color—in the strong lines, intense shadows, and spectacular hues of the mountains above Santa Fe.
Rounding out the exhibition is the recent Landscape, on loan from the artist. Executed in ink and wash, this expressive work belongs to an experimental series of largely abstract images that, in George’s words “is an assurance that life is worth living as long as there is still adventure.”
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure that includes an interview with the artist by the writer Richard Trenner and a checklist of the works on view.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM
