Word: ferren
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Through the cold-water flats, walk-up studios, automats and bars where Manhattan's artists live and congregate buzzed disturbing news: the first major defection from the ranks of the abstract expressionists had taken place. Longtime Abstractionist John Ferren, 51, had hung a show of his new paintings in which nearly every canvas was centered around an all-too-recognizable bottle, beaker, carafe or cognac glass. What had the artists buzzing was why Ferren had hit on the bottle, and what had hit him hard enough to make him turn his back on the abstractionists' decade of painting...
Ball of Fire. Surrounded by his new creations-done in hot yellows, blues and "searing crimsons, and flecked over with brush strokes in glittering silver and gold that often made them appear to be glowing chalices-Ferren admitted he was as surprised as his old comrades in arms. "What does it mean?" he asked. "You tell me. This hits a man right down where he ticks. All I know is that it had to happen. First I started with two lines, like a figure; then came a central ball of fire in a parenthesis. I closed the parenthesis, and there...
What made Ferren's conversion significant is that he is one of the oldest abstractionists going, with an established prewar-Paris reputation. In the '30s he rated one-man shows, shared gallery space in group shows with such now famous moderns as Alberto Giacometti, Arp, Hans Hartung and Kandinsky. Gertrude Stein, who had taken a shine to the strapping, red-haired painter from Pendleton, Ore., announced in Everybody's Autobiography: "He is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might only perhaps...
Back in Manhattan after World War II service overseas in the Psychological Warfare Division (SHAEF), Ferren soon became a leading practitioner and exponent of the new abstract expressionist movement, was a founding member of the artists' informal Greenwich Village headquarters, "The Club," served on the selection committee for the 1949 "Ninth Street Show," which pulled together Manhattan's abstract artists in one big show for the first time...
...election of the following officers for 1957-58: President, James L. Kincaid '58, of Winthrop House and Kansas City, Mo.; Vice-President, Richard H. Murray '58, of Winthrop House and Mahtomedi, Minn.; Treasurer Arthur W. Todd '58, of Eliot House and Princess Anne, Md.; Home Secretary, John M. Ferren '59, of Kirkland House and Evanston, Ill.; Corresponding Secretary, Jared M. Diamond '58, of Winthrop House and Brookline, Mass.; Publicity Director, David L. Bynum '59, of Kirkland House and Coffeyville, Kansas; Director of Competition, Melvin S. Schwarzwald '59, of Kirkland House and Canton, Ohio...