Robert Goodnough

(1917-2010) 

Robert Goodnough was an important second-generation Abstract Expressionist artist from the New York School best known for paintings with confetti-like geometric shapes and calligraphic marks. He preferred to use a primary color palette and favored large-scale canvases. Goodnough was born in Cortland, NY and grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York. After earning a fine arts degree from Syracuse University in 1940, he was drafted into the Army and served in the field artillery. He was also commissioned to paint portraits and murals at military sites. When he returned to NY in the late 40s, he studied at the Amadee Ozenfant School of Fine Arts and then with Hans Hofmann in Massachusetts. He earned his MFA in Art Education in 1950 from New York University.

Goodnough’s early work was figurative, but he adopted a cubist approach in his style after seeing paintings by Picasso during WWII. His work later became more abstract as he was exposed to the paintings of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock in New York. He appreciated the freedom abstraction allowed and explained his thoughts about it a very accessible way:

From the Artist:

In more realistic painting, the color has to fit the form or the shape you started with; so if you have a coat and it’s red, the color fits into the shape of the coat. But in abstract painting, it’s just the opposite: you want to use a color so you decide how much red you want or need, then you fill the whole painting with red, or perhaps three-quarters of it, and the whole approach is much freer emotionally.

One of Goodnough’s signature styles came about after seeing dinosaur skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History in 1952. He began to make collages of dinosaurs that soon evolved into more spontaneous, non-representational works. Some of his commonly used shapes look very similar to the bony plates on the back of a stegosaurus. 

Goodnough had his first important one-person show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in NY in 1952. His work was also selected by Leo Castelli for the 9th Street Exhibition along with paintings by de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler. Today his work may be found in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Smithsonian Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.; and in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.