Ronald Bladen
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Ronald Bladen (born July 13, 1918 in Vancouver , British Columbia , † February 3, 1988 in New York City , USA ) was an American painter and sculptor . He is considered an important representative of minimalism in sculpture.
life and work
Bladen was born in Vancouver to British immigrants. His parents were socialists , his mother had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and was an active member of the suffragette movement in Great Britain.
From 1937 to 1939 Bladen studied at the Vancouver School of Art , from 1938 in the painting class of Allen Edwards. In 1939 Bladen moved to San Francisco to continue his studies there. There he met the Mexican painter Diego Rivera . By 1943, Bladen studied painting and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts , later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute, and attended evening classes at this school until 1945.
Ronald Bladen had close contact with contemporary American writers (for example Allen Ginsberg ) and in 1945 became a member of the Libertarian Circle , a group of anarchist - pacifist artists around the writer Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982). Bladen became an American citizen in 1951. Bladen stayed in the United States and moved to New York in 1956.
In 1946, Bladen had his first solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He painted in the style of Abstract Expressionism , with intensely colored spots in organic forms that depicted landscape-like paintings.
In 1962 he exhibited his first painted plywood reliefs in the Brata Gallery and the Green Gallery in New York. In the following years he created his first free-standing, colored sculptures from plywood panels with metal struts. From then on, Bladen devoted himself exclusively to sculpture. In 1964 he showed his first sculpture " White Z " at an exhibition in the Park Place Gallery in New York.
After an important exhibition in 1966 at the Jewish Museum in New York " Primary Structures Younger American and British Artists ", together with Carl Andre , Dan Flavin , Donald Judd , Sol LeWitt , Walter De Maria , Robert Morris , Tony Smith and Robert Smithson , Ronald Bladen is considered one of the most important representatives of minimalism. In 1968 he participated in the 4th documenta in Kassel in the sculpture department .
From 1974 to 1976 Bladen taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York and from 1976 was a teacher at the Parsons School of Fine Art , 1981 to 1982 at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and from 1982 to 1983 visiting professor at Yale University in New Haven , Connecticut .
Ronald Bladen died of cancer in New York in 1988.
Prizes and awards
- 1975: Mark Rothko Fellowship
- 1965 and 1977: National Medal of Arts by the National Endowment for the Arts
Literature and Sources
- Exhibition catalog for the IV. Documenta: IV. Documenta. International exhibition ; Catalog: Volume 1: (Painting and Sculpture); Volume 2: (Graphics / Objects); Kassel 1968
- Kimpel, Harald / Stengel, Karin: documenta IV 1968 International Exhibition - A Photographic Reconstruction (series of publications from the documenta archive); Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86108-524-9
Web links
- Homepage of the Ronald Bladen Foundation
- Materials by and about Ronald Bladen in the documenta archive
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bladen, Ronald |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bladen, Charles Ronald Wells |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter and sculptor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 13, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Vancouver , Canada |
| DATE OF DEATH | 3rd February 1988 |
| Place of death | New York City , USA |