Early Life And Formation

John Ferren was born in Pendleton, Oregon, on October 17, 1905. At the age of twenty, he apprenticed with an Italian stonecutter in San Francisco. Ferren’s early experiences with stonecutting influenced his style, particularly evident in the sculptural quality of his paintings, achieved through flat backgrounds and curving planes.

Though Ferren was known later in his career as an intellectual among his peers, he avoided academia and formal art institutions, preferring to develop his own artistic style and theories that were nourished by his adventurous lifestyle and curious mind. Going to Europe in 1929, he sat in on classes at the Sorbonne in Paris and also studied briefly at the Universita degli Studi in Florence and the Universidad de Salamanca. Ferren once said, “[I] literally learned art around the cafe tables in Paris, knowing other artists and talking.”

In Saint-Tropez, he met Hans Hofmann, Vaclav Vytlacil, and other Hofmann students. When Ferren stopped to visit them in Munich, he saw a Matisse exhibition, an experience that was instrumental in shifting his work from sculpture to painting.

Paris And European Modernism

His travels in Europe exposed him to the modern art movements of the early twentieth century, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. In 1930, Ferren returned to San Francisco for his debut solo exhibition at the Art Center; however, the lack of energy and artistic stimulation on the West Coast at that time led him to return to Paris in 1931, where he lived for most of the next seven years.

Surrounded by the Parisian avant-garde, Ferren wrestled with his own idiom. His diaries from these years indicate far-ranging explorations, from a Hofmann-like concern for surface to the spiritual searches of Kandinsky and Mondrian.

Atelier 17 And Relief Sculpture

In Paris, Ferren was introduced to William Stanley Hayter’s Atelier 17, where some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Joan Miro, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, participated in experimental workshops. Like them, Ferren explored Hayter’s revolutionary theories on “the nature of space in a linear world,” inquiries that transformed Ferren’s style.

He rediscovered sculpture and developed a new technique for creating relief sculptures by pouring plaster into lines etched in a metal etching plate. The graceful lines he had etched were revealed on the plaster surface, creating rhythmic compositions. These reliefs were among Ferren’s most successful works. Writer Gertrude Stein said of him, “Ferren ought be a man who is interesting, he is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose paintings interest them. He is young yet and might do . . . that thing called abstract painting.”

The Paris Avant-Garde

Although Gallatin and Morris were the first Americans to buy his paintings, Ferren associated with members of the Abstraction-Creation group rather than with the American expatriate community. He married the daughter of Spanish artist Manuel Ortiz de Zarate. Through this union he met the circle of Parisian-Spanish painters that included Picasso, Miro, and Torres-Garcia.

With Jean Helion, Ferren wrote manifestoes against Surrealism, although he remained friendly with Max Ernst and Andre Breton, and illustrated books by Surrealist poets. In Paris, he met Pierre Matisse, who in 1936 hosted a show of Ferren’s work at his New York gallery.

War Years And Abstraction

During World War II, Ferren served with the Office of War Information in the North African and European theaters. By this time, Ferren had reintroduced the figure into his paintings without giving up abstraction. It was not until the end of World War II that he turned toward Abstract Expressionism.

In transitions that ranged from geometric abstractions to figurative paintings, Ferren was always striving to be truthful and to create work that spoke from within. In the abstract and geometric periods that followed the war, he freely expressed what he felt to be the final objective behind the act of painting: the search for, and expression of, the reality behind the appearance of the world.

His early appreciation of Kandinsky and a fascination with Zen that dated from his youth helped define the way he thought about painting throughout his life. He called art the “great common denominator between knowledge and insight,” and said it should explore the intuitive forces of life, whether spiritual, mental, social, or psychological.

New York And The Club

Ferren returned to the United States in 1948, settling in New York. He attended American Abstract Artists meetings but felt little of the frustration that had prompted the organization’s formation. After Ad Reinhardt used Ferren’s name without permission on a pamphlet passed out on the Museum of Modern Art picket line, Ferren broke from the group.

He established himself in New York’s art community by becoming a member, and later president, of The Club, an informal group of artists who represented the social and intellectual center of Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Film Collaborations And Later Work

Always exploring new forms of art, in the late 1950s Ferren collaborated with film director Alfred Hitchcock, serving as artistic consultant for the films The Trouble with Harry (1955) and Vertigo (1958). He continued to paint and exhibit actively until his passing in 1970.

Legacy And Collections

In the same way that Ferren remained honest to his vision through his work, his paintings exemplify a truth based on a beauty that cannot be fully verbalized, but once seen, the power of their beauty is easily experienced. Findlay Galleries proudly presents John Ferren’s work as the sole representative of his estate.

John Ferren’s work can be found in the collections of esteemed institutions across America, including the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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