Thornton Willis

Thornton Willis (born May 25, 1936) is an American abstract painter.

He has contributed to the New York School of painting since the late 1960s.

Viewed as a member of the Third Generation of American Abstract Expressionists, his work is associated with Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Process Art,

Postminimalism, Bio-morphic Cubism (a term he coined) and Color Field painting.

Thornton Willis's father, Willard Willis, was an evangelical preacher in the Church of Christ.

Willis spent formative years in Montgomery Alabama, returning to graduate from Tate High School in Pensacola, Florida.

After three years in the United States Marine Corps, Thornton Willis studied, under the G.I. Bill, at Auburn University for one year transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi where he graduated with a B.A. in 1962.

In the summer of 1964, he enrolled at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, for graduate studies and received a teaching assistantship, and his M.A. in 1966.

While at the University of Alabama he was befriended by the American football quarterback Joe Namath, met visiting artist Theodoros Stamos, and primarily studied painting with Melville Price, a painter who had shown in New York City with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning and had been a member of The Club at the Cedar Tavern.

During these years, Willis also participated in the Civil Rights Movement including the march from Selma to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Throughout his painting studies, Thornton Willis became highly influenced by the tenets of Abstract Expressionism embodied in The New York School of painting, including second generation painters such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

His early work was equally informed by the more reductive paintings of Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella.

These two polarities, Expressionism and Cubism were the early foundations of his paintings and continue to inform his work to this day.

In 1967 Thornton Willis accepted a teaching position at Wagner College in Staten Island, and moved to New York City.

He established his first studio in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

From 1967 to 1973, Thornton Willis worked on a series of paintings now called his “Slat Series” involving a “wet on wet” process working on the floor on large wet unstretched canvas and using rollers with long extension handles to develop striped bands across the entire picture plane.

In 1968, he had his first one-person show at the Henri Gallery in Washington, DC.

In New York, Willis met fellow painters, Dan Christensen, Jules Olitski, Ken Showell as well as sculptors and installation artists Richard Serra, Alan Saret, and Gordon Matta-Clark, all working out of a process art orientation.

In 1970, Willis was included in the exhibition entitled “Lyrical Abstraction” curated by Larry Aldrich, and the painting from this show, “Wall”, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 96 inches by 114 inches, was originally exhibited at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Some of the other artists connected with Lyrical Abstraction were Victoria Barr, Jake Berthot, Dan Christensen, Ronnie Landfield, Pat Lipsky, John Torreano, Phillip Wofford and Robert Zakanitch.

He had a one-person show of his “Slat” paintings at the Simonne Stern Gallery, New Orleans in 1970, and at The New Orleans Museum of Fine Art (then The Delgado Museum,) in 1971 which also owns a large slat painting.

When in 1971, Mr. Aldrich donated this collection to The Whitney Museum of American Art, John Baur, the museum director, mounted a second Lyrical Abstraction exhibition and Willis's painting Wall became part of the Whitney Museum's permanent collection.

The “Slat” series also attracted Bykert Gallery director, Klaus Kertess, and in 1971 Willis joined the Paley and Lowe Gallery, New York City, as part of its original stable of eight artists including, Joan Snyder, Mary Heilmann, Peter Pinchbeck, Herbert Schiffrin, Fred Gudziet, Mike Bakaty, Peter Bradley, and Michael Goldberg who joined later.

A “Slat” painting was purchased by William Paley, then Chairman of the Board of CBS, and is now in The Museum of Broadcasting, NYC.

From 1971 to 1972, Willis taught painting at Louisiana State University in New Orleans.

He continued to show with Simonne Stern through 1974.

After returning to New York City, Willis began his formalist compositions exploring Form and Field ambiguity that led to his “Wedge” series, 1974-1982.

During this time he co-founded “Review: Artists on Art” with his wife.

He showed his work at the Holly Solomon Gallery, NYC, in 1976, and in 1979 Thornton Willis won a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting.

In the same year his work was included in the controversial exhibition “American Painting: The Eighties, a critical interpretation” organized and curated by Barbara Rose.

The exhibition opened at the Grey Art Gallery, NYC and traveled first to The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, then to the American Center, Paris, France before traveling around the world as a United States Ambassadorial show to over twenty other countries.

In 1979, Thornton Willis exhibited his “Wedge” Paintings at the 55 Mercer Street Gallery where the work attracted the attention of British collectors, Robin Symes, and Charles and Doris Saatchi.

He showed the “Wedge” paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery, NYC, in 1980 is an exhibition entitled “Seven Young Americans” curated by Sam Hunter which included friend and fellow artist Sean Scully.

In 1980 he had a one-person show at the Oscarsson Hood Gallery who would represent the artist until 1986.

In 1980 he met the European dealer, Claes Nordenhake, and exhibited his “Wedge” paintings in Malmo, Sweden, Gothenburg, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland and Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1982, Willis began a series of overlapping “wedges’ or “double wedges’ that allowed exploration of the vertical colored bands created where the edges met.

“Striped Suit”, 1982, a large double wedge canvas was featured on the cover of Arts Magazine with an essay by Steven Henry Madoff, Looking for Thornton Willis: A Treatise.

With the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, in 1984, Willis exhibited Red Warrior in An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture.

By 1984 the work had changed again as Willis sought a more complex geometry.

By 1990 he had gone back to the triangle but this time in an overall grid for which he coined the term “biomorphic cubism”.