John altoon biography
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John Altoon
John Altoon’s short career offers near-perfect fodder for art-historical mythmaking. It contains all the ingredients of a durable fable: a fiery personality (he fought mental illness, often trashing his own work and threatening to destroy that of others); right-time-right-place fortune (late 1950s Los Angeles, coming into its own as an art community); the esteem and affection of fellow travelers (among them Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Ruscha, and others in the Ferus galleri stable, of which he was a stalwart); and an early death at age forty-three in 1969 (due to a heart attack). True to parable form, redemption follows years of posthumous obscurity except among West Coast cognoscenti. A svälla of scholarly and institutional attention to postwar LA over the past decade or so has renewed interest in many of the period’s artists, including Altoon, who seems finally to be getting his critical due—a retrospective in San Diego in 1997 and two New York
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John Altoon Biography
View Art by John Altoon
John Altoon (1925-1969) Paintings by John Altoon are as passionate and expressive as the artist himself. As such, it is not surprising that Altoon closely aligned himself with the Abstract Expressionist of the early 1950s. Altoon’s paintings recall the bold work of DeKooning and Kline. Although Altoon did associate with the New York avant-garde of the early 1950s, he earned more notoriety by facilitating the diffusion of unconventional thinking from the East to the West Coast. As one of the first artists of the infamous Ferus Gallery, Altoon helped to generate new thinking in the Los Angeles art world. This thinking certainly contributed to LA’s current stronghold on the contemporary art scene. “If the [Ferus] gallery was closest in spirit to a single person, that person was John Altoon – dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious – and slightly mad.” --Irving Blum, former co-owner of Ferus Gallery.
The Ferus Gallery
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John Altoon
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