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Louis Stone (1902-1984)


9 of 9
Provence Landscape, c.1929 oil on canvas 23"...

Provence Landscape, c.1929
oil on canvas
23" x 28"

Untitled, c.1929 oil on canvas 21 1/4" x 25 1...

Untitled, c.1929
oil on canvas
21 1/4" x 25 1/2"
 

Untitled, c.1930 oil on canvas 23 1/2" x 29&q...

Untitled, c.1930
oil on canvas
23 1/2" x 29"
 

Untitled, c.1938 oil on canvasboard 16" x 12&...

Untitled, c.1938
oil on canvasboard
16" x 12"

 

Untitled, c.1938 stucco, oil, and gesso on panel 3...

Untitled, c.1938
stucco, oil, and gesso on panel
32 x 26 x 1 1/4 inches including artist's original painted wood frame
24 x 17 7/8 x 1/8 inches, signed

Untitled, c.1940 oil on canvas 31 7/8" x 17 7...

Untitled, c.1940
oil on canvas
31 7/8" x 17 7/8", signed

 

Untitled, c.1940 oil on canvas 38" x 26"...

Untitled, c.1940
oil on canvas

38" x 26"
 

Untitled, c.1940 oil on canvas 33" x 26"...

Untitled, c.1940
oil on canvas
33" x 26", signed
 

Untitled, c.1945 oil on canvas 25" x 28"...

Untitled, c.1945
oil on canvas
25" x 28"


Exhibitions


New & Noteworthy

The New York Times, December 6, 2002

The New York Times, December 6, 2002

by Ken Johnson

Download PDF

MRG PRESS RELEASE

MRG PRESS RELEASE

The Path to Abstraction, 1928-1945

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Prints & Publications


Artist Information

“God is a being—an intelligence, who k...

“God is a being—an intelligence, who knows all the laws of the universe and has the power to operate them.”

Louis King Stone was born in Findlay, Ohio in 1902. When he was a child, his family moved to Mount Vernon, New York and then Newark, New Jersey. In the 1920s, Stone studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Students League in New York City with Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton before rejoining his family in Lansing, Michigan, where he went to work for a company designing cemetery monuments. In 1927, Stone moved to Providence, Rhode Island and continued to design monuments while also pursuing art. He spent the summer of that year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he studied painting with T.K. Breckenridge and met artist Carolyn Hoag, whom he married in the fall. Shortly after the wedding, Stone and Hoag left for Europe.

From 1927 to 1933, Stone and Hoag lived and painted in Europe, spending most of their time in France. In 1928, Stone studied at the Académie Colorossi in Paris, where he would socialize in the afternoon in Montparnasse with artists, poets and writers including Marsden Hartley. Later that year, on a trip to Aix-en-Provence Stone visited Cézanne’s studio and decided to rent the property. For a year and a half, Stone and Hoag lived in Cézanne’s former home, along with friend and fellow artist Charles Evans. In 1929, they moved on to Munich, where Stone attended the Hofmann School of Fine Arts, before relocating to the village of Mirmande, an artist’s colony on one of the foothills of the French Alps. In Mirmande, Stone studied with André Lhote at the artist’s summer school. Like Hofmann, Lhote became an important influence on Stone’s later, non-objective art. In 1933, Stone returned to the United States, living briefly in Woodstock, New York before traveling to Florida where he and painter James S. Morris co-founded the Stone-Morris School of Fine Arts in Jacksonville. However, students had difficulty paying tuition, and the school was forced to close.

In 1935, Stone moved to Lambertville, New Jersey, a town close to New Hope, Pennsylvania, which was home to an active artistic community. To support his family, Stone worked for the easel division of the WPA, painting from his home and creating murals for public buildings throughout the United States. Reunited with Evans, Stone became a leading member of the recently formed Independents, a New-Hope-based modernist artist’s collective founded by Charles F. Ramsey. Like other associations of American artists during this period, the Independents struggled to gain recognition in a culture that was not particularly receptive to abstract art. In 1937 Stone exhibited in the First Annual Member Exhibition of the American Artists’ Congress held in Rockefeller Center, and in 1938, Stone became a co-founder of the Cooperative Painting Project. An independent group inspired by the performances of improvisational jazz musicians, its objective was to recreate the process of composing jazz and discover whether painting could, like music, be a collaborative process. To that end, the Project held visual “jam sessions,” where Stone, Evans, and Ramsey would work together on a single painting, signing the finished work with the combined moniker “Ramstonev.” Stone frequently collaborated and exchanged ideas with other members of the Independents—including B.J.O. Nordfeldt, John Nevin, Lloyd “Bill” Ney, and Elsie Driggs—but his work from the mid-1930s and 1940s retains a distinctive style that demonstrates a mastery of the modernist lessons he learned in Europe and an innovative use of flat color to suggest three dimensional space. In 1939, his work was exhibited at the Worlds Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York City. His painting was shown at the 1940 New Jersey Art Fair at the Newark Museum, and in 1941, he was included in a group exhibition at Princeton University, Paintings and Sculpture by New Jersey Artists, juried by John Marin, Alfred Barr, and Lee Gatch

Stone once remarked that he wanted “to keep his colors alive,” and consequently, his work contains visually complex color harmonies that demonstrate his willingness to break the stylistic conventions of the School of Paris in favor of a more idiosyncratic palette. Stone exhibited regularly and locally throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1976, the Princeton Gallery of Fine Art mounted an exhibition of thirty-five paintings. However, a fire at the gallery destroyed the work, eliminating three-years’ worth of creative labor. Stone continued to paint and travel extensively with his family throughout North America until his death in 1984 at the age of 82 at his home near Lambertville, NJ. The last two decades have witnessed a resurgent interest in Stone’s art, which has been a part of several group exhibitions in New York City and was the subject of two solo shows at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (2002 and 2006).

Since 2002, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC has been the exclusive representative of the Louis K. Stone Art Trust.

SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN
James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA
The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ
The Noyes Museum of Art, Stockton University, Hammonton, NJ
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

1923 
Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH

1926
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art summer session, Chester Springs, PA (under Daniel Garber)

1926-7 
Art Students League, New York City

c.1928 
Academie Colorossi, Paris, France

1929 
Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, Munich, Germany (under Hans Hofmann)

c.1930 
Andre L’hote’s summer school in Mirmande, France

 

 

1939 
Charles-Fourth Gallery, New York, NY

1950 
Paintings by Louis Stone, Charles-Fourth Gallery, New Hope, PA

1952 
Charles-Fourth Gallery, New Hope, PA

1962 
Paintings by Louis Stone, Baltic Studios, New Hope, PA

1967
Argus Gallery, Madison, NJ
Princeton Gallery of Fine Art, Princeton, NJ

1969 
Baltic Studios, New Hope, PA

1978 
Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA

1988 
Louis Stone, Robert Schoelkopf Gallery Ltd.

2002 
Louis Stone: American Modernist, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

2005 
Louis Stone: The Path to Abstraction, 1928-1945, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

c.1930s 
Artists of Southeast France

1935 
Studio of the Valley Road Guest House

1937 
American Artists Congress, New York, NY

1938 
American Artists Congress, New York, NY

1939 
New York Worlds Fair, New York, NY
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1940 
New Jersey Art Fair, The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ

1941 
Exhibition of Pennsylvania Paintings and Sculpture by New Jersey Artists, Lower Cloister, Madison Hall, The Creative Arts Program, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

1948 
New Hope Art Associates Gallery, New Hope, PA

1949 
Phillips Mill Art Exhibition, Bucks County, New Hope, PA

1958 
American Artists Congress, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ
Thirty Paintings from the Delaware Valley, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ

1962 
Trenton Museum, Trenton, NJ
New Hope Art Associates Gallery, New Hope, PA
Meierhans Galleries, Hagersville, NJ

1969 
Phillips Mill 40th Annual Exhibition, New Hope, PA

1975 
The Alternative View: A Departure from Current Trends, Fred Clark Museum, Carversville, PA

1978 
Philadelphia Sketch Club, Philadelphia, PA

1979
50th Anniversary Retrospective Art Exhibition, Phillips Mill Community Association, New Hope, PA

1980 
Works on Paper: Liz Dauber and Louis Stone, Princeton Gallery of Fine Art, Princeton, NJ

1983 
Phillips Mill 54th Annual Fall Exhibit, Phillips Mill Community Association, New Hope, PA

1984 
American Moderns: 1920-1950, Janet Fleisher Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

1985 
Images in Art: Gerald Coarding and Louis Stone, Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ

1988 
Robert Schoelkopf Gallery Ltd.

1990 
Modern American Art 1920-1955, Snyder Fine Art, New York, NY
Recent Acquisitions of 20th Century Art, The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC

1991 
The New Hope Modernists: 1917-1950, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA

1992
20th Century Works From the Permanent Collection, The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC

1996 
The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC

1998 
American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s: The J. Donald Nichols Collection, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC
Defining the Edge: Early American Abstraction, Selections from the Collection of Dr. Peter B. Fischer, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY

2001 
The Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC
Up The River: The Pennsylvania Impressionists and Modernists, The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Princeton, NJ

2002 
Small Scale - Large Dimension: Early American Abstraction, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY

2003  
The New Hope School, Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA

2005 
Objects of Desire: Treasures from Private Collections, James A. Michener Museum, New Hope, PA

2006 
Selections from the Permanent Collection, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA

2009 
Cézanne and American Modernism, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ

2011
The Painterly Voice: Bucks County's Fertile Ground, James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA

2012
INsite/INchelsea: The Inaugural Exhibition, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2013   
American Abstraction, 1930-1945, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

2022   
Graphic Eloquence: American Modernism on Paper from the Collection of Michael T. Ricker, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA