Myron Stout’s Monkish Devotion to Art

In our late capitalist age of industrial fabrication and reproducible art, Myron Stout stands out as a reclusive figure who was never lured by these strategies. With monkish devotion, he produced a small body of modestly sized black and white paintings as well as drawings done in charcoal, graphite, and conte pencil, while living in Provincetown, a remote seaside town at the tip of Massachusetts. Never seeking attention, the artist, who lived from 1908 to 1987, was the subject of only five exhibitions during his lifetime. Sanford Schwartz, who curated his 1980 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, wrote in 1975: “The smallness of Stout’s output is spectacular — he’s with Vermeer in that department.”  

While it is widely believed that Vermeer created 60 paintings in his lifetime, 36 of which have survived, Stout’s output in painting was probably even smaller. Famously fussy about the rounded, archaic forms that preoccupied him from the mid-1950s until 1980, when blindness prevented him from continuing with his practice, he produced fewer than two dozen paintings and an equal number of graphite pencil drawings, a medium he turned to in the late 1950s as an alternative to charcoal. This enabled him to attain a wider range of subtly different tones, while shifting the pencil’s linear marks to even surfaces of gray. 

As a longtime admirer of Stout’s art, I was thrilled to learn about a large cache of unknown works that make up the exhibition Myron Stout: Charcoal Drawings at Peter Freeman, Inc. Still, walking around this beautifully installed show, I was surprised by how decisive and searching his art appeared once he moved away from geometric figures to pared-down geometric abstraction. All but two of the 35 charcoal drawings on view are rendered on identically sized sheets of Strathmore paper. The earliest works were probably made in the 1940s after World War II, while he was studying art with Hans Hofmann in New York, and the last ones were likely done shortly after he settled in Provincetown in 1952. 

It was in Provincetown that Stout moved away from geometric painting and European abstraction and toward centered, symmetrical, biomorphic shapes inspired by his reading of Ancient Greek mythology and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles; he began to gain attention with this latter body of work. What this exhibition demonstrates is that Stout achieved an ascetic sensuality in his geometric abstractions, a paradoxical synthesis of restraint and hedonism that is unmatched by any of his contemporaries. 

The period from 1946 to ’53, in which Stout made these drawings, overlaps with the breakthroughs of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock and the rise of what Clement Greenberg characterized as “American-Type Painting.” From the beginning, Stout was an outlier. He started off by making cubistic figure studies in Hofmann’s class, which had none of the muscular linearity we find in the charcoal drawings of other students, such as Lee Krasner and Paul Resika. Once he began making geometric black and white works, he sought to create a sharp tension between the paper’s flat plane and containing edges and the diagonal arrangement of the black and white rectangles. His blacks range in density from sooty to ashy, a result of controlling the pressure. 

In his exquisite calibration of density, interlocking of different sized shapes, and use of cropping, Stout has no peer. What looks simple at first is actually a complex matter of fine tuning. When he makes a black rectangle, he doesn’t just fill it in. He is attentive to the repetitive direction of the mark as well as the level of pressure to apply to achieve an overall evenness of color. In his geometric abstractions, he moves closer to the conte crayon works of Georges Seurat, something that would come to fruition in his graphite pencil drawings. Stout shows us that perfection can be achieved through attention to the basic movement and pressure of the hand; it is something that can only be learned from experience. The patient singularity of his pursuit is breathtaking.

Myron Stout: Charcoal Drawings continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Soho, Manhattan) through March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

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