The forthcoming John Opper exhibition devoted to his works from the 1950s will be the artist’s second at the Washburn Gallery. Writing of the first Opper show in 2003, Michael Kimmelman said “John Opper’s career encapsulates much of what transpired in advanced American art in the middle decades of the 20th century.”
Opper was born in Chicago in 1908, studied in Cleveland and came to New York in the 1930s where he became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists in 1936 and also joined the easel division of the W.P.A. During the 1940s, Opper taught regularly at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
By the end of the 1940s, John Opper’s work exemplified Abstract Expressionism. In 1955, the Egan Gallery organized an exhibition of Opper’s paintings, and many of the same will also be seen in the Washburn Gallery. Parker Tyler remarked in his Art News Opper review, “Relatively few are as good at it as he is.” The Egan show was followed by an exhibition in 1959 at the Stable Gallery. The two exhibitions of John Opper’s work from the 1950s organized by the Washburn Gallery serve to remind us of Opper’s achievement and his clear relationship to the major artists of this remarkable decade.