Word: congdon
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Voluble and intense, Congdon is the son of a rich Providence, R.I., steelmaker. Brought up as an Episcopalian, he went to St. Mark's School and Yale; with his parents' reluctant approval and support, he studied sculpture in Boston under George Demetrious, painting in Philadelphia and Provincetown, Mass. At the start of World War II, Congdon, a lifelong bachelor, gave up painting to buy his own ambulance, trailed the British Eighth Army through battles in Egypt, Libya, Italy and Germany. "The war was the savior of my life," he recalls. "It gave me a feeling of being needed...
...Explosion." Congdon spent nearly a year on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee in Italy before returning home to take up a life in art. He rented a cold-water flat near Manhattan's Bowery for $17 a month, began to paint his vision of city life. Trained as a sculptor, he never bothered with brushes, instead squished thick layers of paint on masonite boards with palette knives, sometimes sprinkling on gold dust to provide added brilliance. Failing to find much spiritual light in Bowery life, he moved to Venice in 1948. There, he would wait, thinking...
...explosions sold. In ten years, he had seven shows with Betty Parsons, a dozen more at other top galleries in Europe and the U.S. Manhattan's Metropolitan, Whitney and Modern Art museums bought his work; so did such collectors as Nelson Rockefeller and Peggy Guggenheim. But Congdon shrank from success. He traveled widely through the Mediterranean in search of new images, drank as a stimulus to creation. "Each painting," he wrote, "seemed to redeem me, as the life-ring saves the drowning man. I began to see in each painting a stay against the eventual death sentence...
...Arch Cliché." Even painting failed. After a visit to Cambodia in 1959, Congdon returned home to Venice convinced that he had exhausted his creative reserve. In this searching mood, he went to Assisi and became a Catholic...
...Congdon still likes the technical beauty of his secular works, but feels there is "a whole new space, life and breath of spirit in my paintings now." As a Christian and an artist, he is aware of the danger that he might confuse the "religious subjects" to which he is drawn for the direct experience and personal vision that can be the only legitimate subject for a work of art. But as an abstract painter, he is appalled at the emptiness and formality of most modern art. "It is the purest materialism," he argues. "My painting seems more important than...