John McLaughlin (artist)

John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin, 1963
Born	John Dwyer McLaughlin (1898-05-21)May 21, 1898 Sharon, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	March 22, 1976(1976-03-22) (aged 77) Dana Point, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Known for	Painting
Movement	Hard-edge painting, Minimalism

John Dwyer McLaughlin (May 21, 1898 – March 22, 1976) was a highly pivotal and significant American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalism and hard-edge painting. Long considered in California as one of the most significant artists of the postwar, McLaughlin painted a focused body of geometric works that are completely devoid of any connection to everyday experience and objects, inspired by the Japanese notion of the void. He aimed to create paintings devoid of any object hood including but not limited to a gestures, representations, figuration, and so on. This led him to the rectangle. Leveraging a technique of layering rectangular bars on adjacent planes, McLaughlin creates works that provoke introspection and, consequently, a greater understanding of one’s relationship to nature. Christopher Knight affirms "McLaughlin is among the most profound avant-garde painters to work in the United States in the aftermath of the cataclysm that was World War II. He’s also Southern California’s first momentous postwar artist. Born in the closing years of the 19th century, he laid the foundation for the environmentally scaled wonders of 1960s Light and Space art, which ranks as Los Angeles’ most original contribution to high culture at the end of the 20th century...McLaughlin began to paint just as its gestural extravagances and emotionally fraught chromatics began to coalesce into the New York School. In the wake of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, those artists stared straight into the void...[McLaughlin's] void is not an abyss of social and spiritual terror in which interior narratives of worldly experience can be told, as it was for Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Instead, his is the negative space that allows consciousness to blossom and manifest itself. Their art is about inviting us into their deep perception, while his is about inviting us into our own. McLaughlin’s void is ma, the poetic space and interval between things that animate Japanese art".

John McLaughlin was born in Sharon, Massachusetts. His father was a Massachusetts Superior Court judge and he had six siblings. His parents instilled in him an interest in art, most specifically Asian art.

McLaughlin served in both World Wars. His service in the United States Navy during World War I spanned from 1917 to 1921.