Herman Cherry
Herman Cherry was a non-objective abstract painter who participated in all five of the artist-curated Stable Gallery exhibitions in Manhattan between 1953 and 1957 and who received his first New York solo exhibition at Stable in 1955. In the early 1930s, he was a student first of the synchromist painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright at the Art Students League of Los Angeles and next of the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. Afterward, Cherry managed a small gallery within a Hollywood bookshop where he gave Philip Guston his first exhibition and where his own first solo was later held. Having transitioned from social realism to cubist-inspired abstraction in the 1940s, Cherry joined with the artists who later became collectively known as the New York School in establishing a style that later became known as Abstract expressionism. Key members of this group were Cherry's friends Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning.
Cherry's mature works were entirely abstract. Known as a masterful colorist, he often received favorable attention from critics and art historians. In 1984, the art historian Helen A. Harrison wrote: "At a time when many artists seem to be angered by paint itself, using it crudely and with little apparent regard for its inherent beauty, Cherry comes off as something of a romantic. His evident enchantment with the medium is expressed in terms of tonal relationships. His colors become characters that act out roles relative to each other, according to their own scenario—sometimes dramatic, sometimes mysterious, occasionally even humorous—as directed by the master's hand. And that direction is as respectful of each color's individuality as it is sensitive to the results of their confrontations and interactions."
During a career that spanned nearly six decades, Cherry's work appeared frequently in solo and group exhibitions within commercial galleries, museums, and the galleries of artists' collectives. Throughout his career, he was active in artists' associations, gave lectures on art, taught art as a visiting professor, wrote articles for art journals, and produced a book of poetry. Born in New Jersey to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, he grew up in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and later spent much of his adult life in Manhattan, Woodstock, and East Hampton, New York.
Early life and training
Cherry was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Late in life, he told an interviewer that his parents opposed his childhood interest in art. Nonetheless, when he was twelve, he began taking free art classes at Philadelphia's Graphic Sketch Club. Three years later, then living in Los Angeles, he dropped out of high school and found work as a set designer for the 20th Century Fox film studio. In 1927, a small compensation he received as victim of an automobile accident enabled him to enroll as a night student at the Otis Art Institute. A scholarship and employment as a school monitor enabled him to continue studying for two years. Cherry later credited one of his Otis teachers, the synchromist artist, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, with his understanding of color. He said: "It wasn’t that he taught me color. He made me see color.” Leaving Los Angeles, he knocked around California as an itinerant laborer and then became a cook's helper on a cargo ship destined for Northern European ports. Having jumped ship in Poland, he spent part of the year 1930 looking at paintings in German museums and galleries and then found work on another ship bound for Savannah, Georgia. While studying with Macdonald-Wright, Cherry had come across an article about Thomas Hart Benton that intrigued him, and so, after landing in Savannah, he hitchhiked to Manhattan to take classes at the Art Students League where Benton was then teaching. In 1931, Benton took him on as an assistant as he began work on Benton's well-known America Today mural for The New School for Social Research.Career in art
In the fall of 1931, Cherry returned to Los Angeles where, for the next few years, he ran a gallery in a disused room at the back of a Hollywood bookshop owned by Stanley Rose. Known first as the Younger Painters' Gallery and later as the Stanley Rose Gallery, it was informally known as the "back room", and it also served as an informal avant-garde cultural center. In 1933, Cherry gave Philip Guston the first exhibition of his career in the Stanley Rose Gallery. When, in 1934, he gave himself his first solo exhibition at the gallery, a critic for the Los Angeles Times said his drawings had "the beauty of clarity in line and form" and said a self-portrait was "strong like wood sculpture and fine in color". Cherry later said that during the three years he ran the gallery he could not recall making a single sale.In 1937, Cherry joined the Federal Art Project. Reporting to the California director of the project, MacDonald-Wright, he worked first in Santa Barbara and later in Los Angeles, where he did little work of his own, but helped Gordon Grant, Lorser Feitelson, and MacDonald-Wright in making murals. Cherry later told an interviewer that working on the project "was like winning a lottery for ten million dollars.... We couldn’t believe that you got paid twenty-three dollars a week, just to paint. It was the craziest thing we ever heard of."
In the late 1930s, Cherry's paintings appeared in group shows on the West Coast along with work by a woman named Denny Winters. When she and he showed together at the Stanley Rose Gallery in 1939, a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times said her paintings showed "endless drama" in her "large, dynamic landscapes" and described Cherry's work as more "concerned with design and pigment," adding, "he knows how to intensify form with deeply glowing color." Their duo show was one of the last held in the Rose Gallery which closed later that year. Also later in the same year, the two of them married and began a collaboration that extended for the next decade.
One of the group shows in which Cherry and Winters showed paintings was mounted in 1938 in the gallery run by the Los Angeles chapter of a radical artists' collective called the American Artists' Congress. A year later, when the American Artists' Congress gave him a solo exhibition, a reviewer praised his "Portrait of a Poet" and described a gruesome painting showing a corpse hanging on a barbed wire barrier.
Cherry's appearance in a group exhibition at the Borden Gallery in Los Angeles in 1939 drew a favorable review in the Los Angeles Times. The critic said he made "color sing beautifully and originally" in one particularly "remarkable abstract piece". Early in 1941, Cherry and Winters designed sets for Duke Ellington's Jump for Joy revue, and later that year, the En's Gallery in Los Angeles gave him a solo exhibition of small paintings and other works. In 1943, he won an award for a painting called "Mickey" at the annual exhibition held by the Los Angeles County Museum and in 1945 he was given a solo exhibition at the George Castine Gallery in that city. Reviewing the latter, a critic praised his handling of color and said his paintings came "from a brush that knows what it is doing". A review in the Los Angeles Times said his paintings were "beautiful in color" and had "sound pictorial construction and enlivening rhythmical schemes." Its reviewer also noted that the show produced quite a few sales.
In the summer months of 1945, Cherry and Denny moved to the artist colony in Woodstock, New York. Cherry joined the Woodstock Artists Association and was soon elected to be one of its directors. In 1947 and 1948, Cherry directed the first of two national art conferences held by the association. That year, he also received his first solo exhibition in a Manhattan commercial gallery. This show, at the Weyhe Gallery, drew favorable reviews in the New York press, including one from Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times praising the wit and inventiveness of some mobiles and stabiles that Cherry called pictographs. Another reviewer said "here there is no great art form, but an unpretentious, original laughter", and a third said they were "all very clever, very gay, and, of course, very sophisticated. In a photo spread from the show, a reporter for Life magazine noted that most of the mobiles had been sold and quoted Cherry as saying he made them simply for fun. A second solo followed at Weyhe in 1948.
In the fall of that year, Cherry and Winters sailed for France on a trip funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship she had won. She returned the following year while Cherry remained abroad. During the rest of 1949, he visited southern France and Italy, taking photographic color slides and gathering material for lectures he planned to give on his return to the US. While in France, he met Henri Breuil, the archaeologist who controlled access to the Lascaux Caves and subsequently became one of the first Americans to observe the prehistoric paintings they contained. After his return, he spent part of 1951 traveling in South America for the same purpose.
Based for a time in Manhattan and having recently divorced from Winters, he developed friendships with Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, Philip Guston, and other artists. He gathered with them at the Cedar Tavern and was inducted into the club that that group had formed to discuss cultural topics. Many members of the group were, as a critic later reported, "straining to arrive at a new, emotive abstraction". The labels "abstract expressionist" and "New York School" would later be applied to these artists. Cherry did not participate in the first of the artist-sponsored shows held by the group in a vacant store on East 9th Street in Manhattan in 1951, but he helped organize and participated in all five of the Stable Gallery shows that they put on between 1953 and 1957. The catalog for the 1953 show included a statement by Clement Greenberg saying the artworks were transitional, "not yet pinned down and fixed by the verdicts of critics, or museums, or 'safe' collectors." Reviewing the following year's show, a critic for Art Digest said a painting of Cherry's was "very well painted and full of romantic mystery." In 1955, Cherry was given a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery which a reviewer described as containing "night world paintings" that revealed his "his efforts to fuse color and form into a single unit."
During the second half of the 1950s, Cherry took color photographs in New York galleries for a color transparency production company called Contemporary Slides. In 1990, an art critic wrote: "If you needed a slide of a work by a member of the New York School, you didn't proceed to the Metropolitan Museum, which, despite the size of its wide collection, had no de Kooning, Pollock, or Rothko in stock, rather, you called Contemporary Slides".
Cherry was given solo exhibitions at the Tanager Gallery in 1958 and the Poindexter Gallery the following year. Both garnered favorable reviews in Art News, the latter claiming that he was at that time "an art world live wire". A second Poindexter solo in 1961 received another favorable Art News review.
By this time, Cherry was spending a good part of his work life teaching art as a visiting professor in US colleges and universities, and many of the solo and group exhibitions in which he participated were consequently held outside New York. While he was serving as an artist-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, Cherry was given a solo exhibition of recent paintings in the school's art gallery. Writing in a local paper, a reviewer said the pictures contained "bold and joyous forms". The same reviewer noted that Cherry's work was "widely represented in important private and public collections."
In 1970, having spent the summer months of the previous few years in rentals, Cherry bought a small house and some land in East Hampton on Long Island, New York.
In 1978-79, Cherry worked in a program funded by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. During this time, he made murals throughout New York City.
In 1983, the Grason Gallery in Chicago gave Cherry his first retrospective exhibition. Covering a period of 25 years, from his last solos in New York commercial galleries up to the present, the show demonstrated, in the words of one reviewer, his "high level of achievement" during a period when he was spending more of his time teaching than painting. A year later, the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave Cherry its Award in Art. Later that year, a solo exhibition in an East Hampton gallery drew forth an admiring review in Art in America. Later yet, in reviewing a solo at the Luise Ross Gallery, Helen A. Harrison, gave Cherry's paintings the most extensive and detailed consideration they had until then received. She wrote: "Cherry has often been characterized as a 'painter's painter,' a term which, it seems to me, implies that ordinary mortals will neither like nor understand what he is up to. It does him no disservice to acknowledge that, over the years, his most appreciative audience has been his fellow artists, partly because only a colleague would be fully aware of the intensity of his struggle with the purest problems of painting. That he has now succeeded in resolving many of those issues in a manner that expands our consciousness of paint's possibilities, while appealing directly to the senses, belies any danger that he will remain of interest only to the specialist."
From 1988 to 1993, Cherry was represented by the Luise Ross Gallery in New York.
In 1989, when the Ball State University Art Gallery gave Cherry a retrospective exhibition of 60 works dating from the 1930s, the critical response was both extensive and entirely favorable. A reviewer from a local paper said that Cherry, then 80 years old, was currently making paintings that were "stronger than ever" and described his earlier work as, variously, "dark and delving" or having "all-encompassing brilliance". Lawrence Campbell, writing in Art in America, said that in the paintings of this exhibit, "colors mysteriously come and go" and he quoted Cherry's comment that to him the paintings had, "resonance from the depth of the canvas to the open sky." At this time, Newsday sent a reporter to interview him at his East Hampton home. When the reporter asked him about the extensive recent attention given him, he said he had been unable to make a living from art sales until he was in his 70s, adding: "I don't understand why I'm having these shows. I'm a little surprised. Not that I don't deserve it, but why now?" Looking back on the days when he and the other abstract expressionists would gather to drink and discuss their work, he said, "It was a very enlightening period for me. I had never met artists such as these, that were intelligent, belligerent and didn't give a damn about success or money."
Cherry's other solo exhibitions of 1989 included appearances at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery and the Luise Ross Gallery in Manhattan, as well as the Baruch College art gallery and the art gallery of the State University at Stony Brook on Long Island.
In reviewing the Stony Brook exhibition, Helen A. Harrison discussed Cherry's career from the time he became, as she said, "deeply involved in what amounted to a reinvention of painting in the post-World War II years" and she went on to describe his recent work as having "shimmering layers of tone no longer move along a flat, one-dimensional plane, but now shift into relief, advancing and receding as and drifting ice is echoed in the implicit movement that many of his paintings suggest." She concluded, "Mr. Cherry is a master of luminosity, calling forth a glow that seems to emanate from within the canvases themselves."
Early in 1992. Cherry participated in a solo exhibition at the Luise Ross Gallery. He died at home in his studio on Mercer Street a few months later, on April 10, 1992. Weakened by a heart attack in 1975, his death resulted from a combination of heart and liver disease. Over the next decade, his work continued to be shown in New York. The Gary Snyder Fine Art Gallery produced a solo in 2002 and a three-artist show the following year. In 2004, a college of Long Island University mounted a solo and Findlay showed his work again in solos over the next three years. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth, Findlay presented a retrospective and in 2009 put on what proved to be the last of its presentations of his art.
Throughout his career, Cherry participated in many group exhibitions, beginning in 1931 with a show he staged at the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, including five of the Whitney Museum's annual exhibitions of contemporary American art between 1948 and 1957. He participated regularly in exhibitions held by the Woodstock Artists Association and other nonprofit organizations as well as commercial galleries and museums across the nation.