Arthur Deshaies

Arthur Deshaies (1920–2011) was an American printmaker and painter who made non-geometric abstractions in a style he called "abstract impressionist."

After his death a curator described a dominant aspect of Deshaies' prints, calling them "biomorphic, surrealist fantasies."

Deshaies showed frequently in commercial and academic galleries and in museums and his work frequently received critical notice.

He employed traditional printmaking techniques and also used new techniques including one that he called stencil-Offset and another which employed sheets of plastic as the matrix.

His long career as an artist was matched by an equally long career as an art teacher.

Deshaies was born and raised in and around Providence, Rhode Island.

Drawn to art at a very young age, he once said that he made his first art prints at the age of ten using the hand wringer from his mother's washing machine.

After he completed his high school education in 1940, he began studying art at Cooper Union in Manhattan.

Having served in the Army for all of World War II, he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

He spent the next two years studying at Indiana University from which he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950.

Beginning in 1950, his work regularly appeared in the National Print Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and in 1964 joined with the museum's print curator and the curator of the Hirshhorn Collection was on the jury that selected prints for the show.

During the 1950s and 1960s he also received MacDowell Colony and Yaddo fellowships, and a Tiffany Foundation award.

In the early 1950s Deshaies made prints by a technique that he called stencil-Offset, which a critic said, used "bright and unequivocal color" with strength and precision to achieve a gracefulness of forms.

One of these Offset prints was a surprising seven feet long by seven inches wide.

In the mid-1950s Deshaies made wood engravings, retaining much of the gestural abstract style he had adopted for his earlier stencil-Offset prints.

In 1952 he won a Fulbright grant for a year of study in France.

In 1952 he was given a solo-exhibition at the Contemporaries gallery in Manhattan.

He was given another solo show two years later, this one at Indiana University, and, later that year, was awarded first prize in painting by the Louisville Art Association.

In 1955, 1961, and 1963 Deshaies' work was included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1955 he described his abstractions as symbols that did not represent any entity already in existence, but rather were themselves reference points to which newly created entities might find links.

He said: "To give a signification to new signs, the reinvention of signs is the measure for individual integrity. Up to now, the process of 'signification' was: a thing was given and a sign was invented for it. Now, a sign will be given; it will be valid if it finds its incarnation."

One of his early prints, "Chinese Carnival" (shown at left) drew repeated notice from New York critics and was reproduced in both the New York Times and the bulletin of the Brooklyn Museum.

He showed the following year in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and in 1959 was given a solo show at Wittenborn's One-Wall Gallery.

During the 1960s Deshaies exhibited in group and solo shows both in Manhattan and out of town, including an exhibition of 55 prints by 48 artists at the National Gallery of Art, a traveling exhibition of 30 prints by 24 artists sponsored by the United States Information Agency, and a solo exhibition in Manhattan's Village Art Center.

In 1961 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

After his appointment as professor of art at Florida State University in 1963, Deshaies was represented by commercial galleries in Tallahassee, Sarasota, and Jacksonville.

During this period he showed less frequently, mostly in group shows at colleges and universities.

In 1987, on the occasion of a solo exhibition of his paintings and mixed-media assemblages on paper, a critic described Deshaies as a man who "hasn't lost his infatuation with hues, textures and deftly wrought abstract compositions."

He began teaching at Indiana while still a graduate student and continued as an art instructor and art professor until his retirement from a position at Florida State University in 1989.

After he retired from Florida State University in 1989, Deshaies moved his studio to Duncan, South Carolina, and began to make more acrylic paintings on canvas than he had earlier in his career.

In 1991 he was given a solo exhibition of his paintings at Florida State University.

In 1995 he participated in a three-artist show called "Painting With Light" at Florida Atlantic University.

Two years later he was given a solo exhibition at the State Street Gallery in Sarasota.

In 1997, looking back on his early career, he said he was influenced by the work of two ground-breaking painters from Barcelona, Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies, both of whom permitted unconscious impulses play a role in their creative work.

After his death a curator described this aspect of Deshaies' prints, calling them "biomorphic, surrealist fantasies."

He was given solo museum shows in 2001 and 2009 at Greenville County Museum of Art and Florida State University, respectively.

Late in life Deshaies told an interviewer that his interest in abstract art dated back to his youth.

"Even as a child," he said, "I wasn't interested in drawing people or things. I was putting colors together and making designs."

As noted above, his desire to make prints had an equally early start.

Like his contemporaries among the abstract expressionists, Deshaies made exclusively non-geometric designs, mostly having natural objects as their subjects.