Alan Gussow
| Alan Gussow | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 8, 1931 New York, NY, USA |
| Died | May 5, 1997 (aged 65) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Abstract Expressionism |
| Awards | Prix de Rome, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Art |
Alan Gussow (May 8, 1931 – May 5, 1997) was an American artist, teacher, author and conservationist devoted to and inspired by the natural environment.
Gussow was born May 8, 1931 in New York City but grew up in Rockville Centre, NY. He took art classes at the Pratt Institute before graduating from Middlebury College in 1952 with a degree in Literature. The following year, while studying painting at Cooper Union, he was awarded the Prix de Rome. Only 21 years old, he was the youngest ever to have won the award at that time. By the time he left New York to study at the American Academy in Rome from 1953 to 1955, Gussow had learned printmaking from Stanley William Hayter, and was already heavily influenced by Paul Klee, Arshile Gorky, and Stuart Davis.
In 1956, Gussow married Joan Dye, who was then a Time magazine researcher and later a nutritionist and chair of the nutrition department at Columbia Teacher's College. Together, they made a home with their sons in the Hudson River Valley, where they eventually became avid organic gardeners, incorporating into their home garden a method of biodynamic double digging championed by Alan Chadwick. Balancing his passion for art with teaching jobs, writing, and endeavors to save the environment, Gussow made yearly painting trips to Monhegan Island, ME and kept a studio in his New York home. He died from cancer May 5, 1997 in Piermont, NY.
Over the course of an artistic career that lasted almost half a century, Gussow honed a visionary blend of abstraction and representation with nature as his primary subject.
Gussow cites his walks through the Middlebury college campus in Vermont as some of his original inspiration to become an artist. His early paintings created in the 1950s and 1960s are landscapes of a more traditional nature, depicting scenes painted from a separate vantage point. Still, Gussow came of age in a time when action painting and artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline were at the peak of their popularity, and eventually he connected the energy of his art with the energy he experienced in natural settings, presenting a perspective all his own.
The works he created throughout the 1970s and the rest of his life capture deeper, more personal encounters with nature—smells, tastes, tactile sensations, sounds. In The New York Times, Holland Cotter describes a selection of Gussow's later pastels, "...passages of undulating horizontal lines suggested both flowing water and fingerprint patterns, summing up the intimate link between man and nature that was Mr. Gussow's central concern."
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