John McLaughlin (painter)

John Dwyer McLaughlin (born May 21, 1898 in Sharon , Greater Boston , † March 22, 1976 in Los Angeles ) was an American painter and an important exponent of American minimal art and hard edge painting .

life and work

John McLaughlin was one of seven children of Judge John Dwyer McLaughlin and grew up in a family that, although not particularly wealthy, was one of the cultural and educational elite of Boston . He was influenced early on by the two painters Kasimir Severinovich Malevich and Piet Mondrian . He later lived in Japan for three years . Upon his return he opened a gallery for Japanese prints in Boston. Because of his language skills acquired in Japan, he was recalled to the intelligence service during the Second World War . During this time he worked as a translator in Japan, Burma and China .

A year after the war ended, he moved to California and settled in Dana Point . Under the influence of Zen Buddhism , he turned to the formal language of abstraction. He trained at the San Francisco Art Institute ; he graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a year later with a Master of Fine Arts .

McLaughlin was above all a well-known painter of the styles of minimalism and hard edge painting on the south west coast of the USA . In Europe and the rest of the USA he was only known after his death. His pictures mainly consist of a series of meditatively calm rectangles. He often reduces his spectrum in the pictures to two or three colors, and the line patterns are sharply separated.

Web links

• galeriezander.com
• The Three from the West Coast in Die Welt on March 17, 2012

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Susan C. Larsen, Peter Howard Selz (Eds.): John McLaughlin - Western modernism, Eastern thought . 1st edition. Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach 1996, ISBN 0-940872-22-6 , pp. 73 (English, 92 pp.).