John Opper

John Opper (1908–1994) was an American painter who transitioned from semi-abstract paintings in the late 1930s to fully abstract ones in the 1950s.

He became known for his handling of color and in particular his ability to create dramatic intensity on the picture plane by means of juxtaposed, more-or-less rectangular areas of color.

He was associated with the abstract expressionist movement and frequently showed in galleries that specialized in abstract expressionist art.

Late in life, he described his style by what it was not.

He said, "The whole is the sum of its parts. That's what my school of abstract art is about, a school that evolved from nature, not conceptual, not geometric, not hard-edged. It's only art."

Opper was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

He became interested in drawing at a young age.

While in high school he took art classes and enrolled in a correspondence art course.

In his senior year he attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Graduating about 1926 he briefly studied at the Cleveland School of Art and there encountered the artists Henry Keller, as an instructor, and Clarence Carter, as a fellow student.

He spent the following year in Chicago taking classes at the Art Institute and subsequently returned to Cleveland where he enrolled at Western Reserve University, graduating in 1932.

Two years later he spent a summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

There, he met Hans Hofmann, who was teaching at the Thurn School of Art.

Hofmann influenced his approach to art, although not as an instructor.

In 1934 Opper moved to Manhattan and a year later began to work in the studio that Hofmann had set up as the School of Fine Arts on East 57th Street.

There he met modernist painters who sought Hofmann's guidance and began to develop his own modernist style.

In 1936 Opper became a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a group formed by New York artists to promote and exhibit a style of art that was then derided by critics and shunned by collectors.

In 1937 the influential critic, Edward Alden Jewell, called this effort a "revolt against literary subject-paintings" and said that the great majority of paintings in a current exhibition were simply "objects."

The same year, after a brief attempt to support himself as an art instructor, Opper joined the Federal Art Project in Manhattan as an easel artist and remained for three years.

He later said that the project was a lifesaver for impoverished artists, particularly abstract artists such as himself.

At the same time, he joined the Artists Union and became business manager of its journal, Art Front.

Within the year, Opper left the Artists Union and joined the American Artists' Congress.

He grew disenchanted with this organization, in turn, and left it after submitting work to two of its group exhibitions.

By his account, during these two years his work was both semi-abstract and anti-war.

Opper was given his first solo exhibition at the Artists Gallery in 1937.

The water colors and temperas he showed drew favorable comment from Howard Devree, critic for the New York Times, who said his realist and semi-abstract landscapes were vigorous, germane, and expressive and from Jerome Klein of the New York Post, who commended Opper's "sparkling brilliance and unfailing vivacity."

Before leaving the Artists' Congress he helped organize its fourth annual exhibition in 1940.

Entitled "Art in a Democracy," the show featured artists across the country who worked in the Federal Art Project.

Writing in the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell said it was "cluttered with shrillness and posturing and ineptitude," but A. Z. Kruse of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that he was overwhelmed by its overall high quality, saying "there are too many noteworthy contributions to permit of enumeration and evaluation."

The Congress was then torn by dissension and on its last legs.

Opper had come to the conclusion that he could not create art as a means of correcting society's ills.

He later said, "I was torn between the needs of the society and the needs of the war on one hand, and on the other hand what I felt were aesthetic needs of painting. So finally the only solution that I was able to make for myself was to begin to separate the two. I was quite active socially, as much as I could be. And as far as my paintings were concerned I began to abstract from nature and work very abstractly."

He took on war-related work between 1942 and 1945 and produced less art than he had in the 1930s.

Nonetheless, he contributed to group exhibitions during this time and in 1942 was given another well-received solo exhibition at the Artists Gallery.

Although he spent most of the post-war period in teaching positions outside New York, he was able both to continue painting and to show the works he made.

In 1947, the curator of modern painting at the Art Institute of Chicago,

Katharine Kuh, took one of his paintings for a show called "Abstract and Surrealist American Art."

Presenting a cross-section of modernist American painting and sculpture, the exhibition uncovered an abstractionist movement that was then beginning to gain momentum, particularly in New York.

In 1953 Opper participated in a group show held at a New York commercial gallery and in 1955 he was the last of a series of abstract expressionist artists to be given solo exhibitions at the Egan Gallery.

In reviewing the show, a critic said Opper's painting "exemplified with gusto the leading contemporary abstract trends in its brushfuls of richly stirred color applied in shaggy strokes and sharp accents."