User:Mar47/Herbert Gentry

Herbert Gentry (1919-2003)

Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1919, Gentry grew up in Harlem. He served in the United States Army in North Africa and France in WWII, and studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1946-1949) in Paris. Gentry remained abroad, living in Paris and Scandinavia. From 1972 until his death in 2003, he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, keeping a studio at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City and another in Sweden.

Gentry’s early, figurative Paris abstractions isolated colorful, shattered organic elements in a cubist space. Working more abstractly in the 1960s, Gentry’s spontaneous calligraphic gestures danced across dark, sunless canvases. An Expressionist painter open to the workings of the unconscious, Gentry evolved his personal iconography of confrontational masks, schematized faces and figures to represent basic human relationships and understandings.

His retrospective at The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (1975) was remarkable; Gentry was the only American to be so honored. The exhibition traveled to Amos Anderson Museum (Finland) and Norrköpings Museum (Sweden). He exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1982, 1996) and Amistad Center for Art and Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT (2005).

His work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Moderna Museet (Sweden); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; and Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands) and many private collections.