Myron Stout was born in 1908 in Denton, TX. After enrolling in Teachers College at Columbia University in 1937, Stout worked as a teacher in Honolulu until he was drafted into the Army in World War II in 1943.
At the advice of a friend, Stout started attending drawing and painting courses at Hans Hofmann’s school in New York in 1947. The experience reinvigorated Stout’s interest in art so completely that by 1949 he quit his teaching post to move full time between New York and Provincetown, where Hofmann’s school moved to during the summer months. He began to make faceted, multicolor geometric paintings and richly dense, pristine charcoal drawings. By 1952 he was living in Provincetown year round, and started a series of observation landscape drawings of the dunes and treelines.
Stout started exhibiting his work in 1952, first at his alma mater, North Texas State Univeristy, followed by a 1954 solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. A 1957 exhibition at the Hansa Gallery solidified his lifelong business relationship with dealer Dick Bellamy, who Stout later followed to the Green Gallery and the Oil and Steel Gallery. The Hansa Gallery show would be his last solo exhibition until the Whitney Museum held a rectrospective 20 years later.
In 1954 Stout started his black and white paintings, which developed out of his interest in Greek mythology and his earlier works in charcoal. Syout made 13 paintings, a number of which he would continue to work on for rest of his life. The ones he finished were well receieved; within a few year the Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Institute had each purchased one for their collections. In 1963 the Jewish Museum included three of them in their “Black and White” exhibition.
Myron Stout passed away in 1987. The Washburn Gallery has represented the artist’s estate and held exhibitions of his paintings and drawings since 1992, including a major 1997 exhibition contrasting his finished and unfinished Black and White paintings. A selection of his journals was published posthumously in 2005, edited by Tina Dickey. Stout’s work is present in many Museum and Public Collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art.