Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on February 23, 2012 of the exhibition and sale, Watercolors by John Whorf, including works rendered from the 1920s through the 1950s. One of the most accomplished and esteemed watercolorists of the first half of the twentieth century, John Whorf (1903–1959) was called “perhaps the most brilliant water-colorist in America today,” in 1929.  In 1938, he was the first contemporary painter to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. Portraying scenes of outdoor life as well as urban, rural, and figural subjects, Whorf worked in a luminous painterly style often compared to that of John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer.  The exhibition is accompanied by an online catalogue by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D..

Consisting of a confident and spontaneous method, John Whorf interspersed sparkling transparent washes with areas of deep opaque color.  Both subtle and spirited, his images express the play of sun and shade over water and land, capturing heightened moments, whether of the solitary suspense of an angler catching a fish or the pensive quiet of a sunrise on a marshy waterway. 

Born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, John Whorf received his initial exposure to art from his father, Harry C. Whorf, a commercial artist and graphic designer.  At age fourteen, he began formal instruction, enrolling simultaneously at the St. Botolph Studio in Boston and at the Boston Museum School, where his teachers were Philip L. Hale and William James.  In the summer of 1917, Whorf studied with Charles W. Hawthorne and George Elmer Browne in Provincetown.  This town, where Whorf’s family had roots, would remain an important source of imagery for him.  Part of the vibrant art colony during his many summers in Provincetown, Whorf became a permanent resident there in 1937. 

In 1919, John Whorf was stricken with transverse myelitis due to a diving accident, leaving him with one leg shorter than the other. He walked with a cane for the rest of his life.  Yet, his disability did not keep him from an active life, and from about 1919 through 1927, he made a number of trips abroad, visiting France, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, and Morocco.  In Paris, he enrolled briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts, the Grande Chaumière, and the Académie Colarossi.  During these sojourns, Whorf turned away from oil painting and focused on watercolor, which he found suited his transient lifestyle and his expressive and aesthetic interests.

John Whorf’s first solo exhibition was held in 1924 at the Grace Horne Gallery in Boston.  The show was a success; fifty works were sold, including one that was purchased by John Singer Sargent, who was in Boston at the time working on murals for the Boston Public Library.  Whorf subsequently brought his sketches to Sargent’s Columbus Avenue studio for the noted expatriate to critique.

Throughout the rest of his career, John Whorf remained a popular and prolific artist.  His annual shows at Grace Horne in Boston and at the Milch Gallery in New York satisfied “the legion of Whorf admirers,” as the New York Times reported in 1940.  A trip to the South Seas in 1929 provided him with subject matter for a number of works, including his shimmering turquoise Sea Swell, West Indies (ca. 1931).

John Whorf was one of two contemporary Massachusetts artists represented in the Museum of Modern Art's 1938 exhibition of American art created in Paris.  In 1947, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design.  He is represented in many important private and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pitti Palace, Florence; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.