Myron Stout (1908–1987) was an American abstract painter whose geometric paintings and drawings bridged the styles of abstract expressionism and minimalism.

He was born in Denton, Texas. During his senior year at North Texas State University, he decided to become a painter. He worked as a teacher, and spent part of his time painting landscapes. After military service in World War II, he resumed painting, and in 1946 began studies with Hans Hofmann. Stout’s works of the period 1947–1952 show the influence of European geometric painting and typically feature multiple intersecting vertical and horizontal bands of color. After about 1950, single forms rather than patterns dominated some of his paintings.

In 1952, Stout relocated to Provincetown. In the autumn of that year his readings of Greek mythology, especially the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, inspired a new direction in his art. Working in black and white, usually on a small scale, he painted flat monolithic shapes which often resembled forks, shields, or lyres.

Stout worked slowly with no regard for careerism. He had an independent income and was not concerned with selling his work. Critic Hilton Kramer described the work as “a mode of abstraction small in scale, purist in form, and intimate in feeling—an art utterly devoid of expressionist bravura and emotional display.”

Although he rarely exhibited, in 1954 he displayed charcoal drawings and paintings at the Stable Gallery in New York. In 1957 he showed at the Hansa Gallery in New York. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969.

Stout had a retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 1977, and a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980. Over the years, I rarely encountered the work other than an exhibition at MIT’s Hayden Gallery and an exhibition of drawings at the Fine Arts Work Center. Relatively unknown today, he was regarded by peers, curators, and critics as a singular abstract artist of his generation. The work is notable for originality and understated perfection.

Interview with Myron Stout

1984

Provincetown, Massachusetts

Charles Giuliano I doubt that you will remember, but we met in the 1960s. We were dinner guests of the artist Therese Schwartz, who knew you from Provincetown. It would have been 1967 or 1968. I had the impression that you visited New York infrequently.

Myron Stout Over the years I have gone less and less. I used to go quite often.

CG I saw your work at MIT’s Hayden Gallery.

MS I thought they did a very nice job. I was there for the opening and can’t remember the last time my work was shown in Boston. My ties are more with New York, where my gallery is located.

CG I am researching Karl Knaths and I understand that you were friends.

MS Yes, we were good friends and I can tell you how we met. In 1953, I came here for the winter and didn’t know anyone. Of course, in the summer it was a different matter particularly as the New York art world came here. Around March, Kenneth Campbell came to my door and introduced himself. “There are not many of us during the winter,” he said. “I am friends with Karl Knaths and we get together.” I went with him to see Karl, who liked to do things on a regular basis.

He suggested that we get together on Wednesday afternoons. We probably had already met during the summer, but I can’t recall. It was a matter of meeting at his studio, mine, or Kenneth’s.

CG This is Day’s Lumber Yard, right?

MS No. Kenneth had his studio at 11 Brewster and this is 4 Brewster, though it was built by Day’s. The lumber yard was on Pearl Street.

These were built by Day as studios for artists over his lumber yard. Early on, Charles Hawthorne’s classes were quite large, but there were no studios. Day knew a number of the artists and created studios for them. He made one set, then another. The Fine Arts Work Center is there now. Then he built this place, which originally had nine studios. The later landlord combined two spaces as his living quarters. Later, I persuaded the landlord to let me combine two spaces. Instead of having my living space and studio all together, I could have a separate studio. So, I have units 4 and 5.

I remodeled it, making it more spacious. We often met here before I did that, as well as after. I’ve had this space since 1955 and remodeled it 1962–1963. It’s an ideal place to live, with plenty of light. Most Provincetown artists, at some point, have lived at Day’s Lumber Yard. Karl told me that, at first, he lived in a net shack on Commercial Street.

CG According to legend, Charles Demuth and Eugene O’Neill also lived there at one time.

MS It may be true, but I don’t know about that. He got into a New York play group and came here with them. Karl did work with them, I heard him talk about that. It was when O’Neill was here. You know Karl’s early history of how he came here from the Midwest. When we met, he was somewhat older than I. Ken and Jim Forsberg were younger. He was translating a book of Einstein’s, the art critic, not the scientist; his book on cubism. He was translating it, but didn’t feel his German was good enough. His German was what he spoke with his family. It was an important work which had not been translated. He would work on it, then come and read it to us.

CG Didn’t Joan (Wye) Forsberg read German?

MS Yes, she did and could contribute to a certain extent. Her German was fresher because she had been born there. Her first years were in Germany but her language wasn’t scholarly. None of us had that, including Karl.

CG Where did you fit in?

MS I’m the one who tried to fit it all into English. Karl, when translating, tended to use German syntax. He was educated in Chicago, but still talked with “Dese” and “Dem.” I think he liked playing the hick. I used to tease him and say, “Karl you know better than that.” When he got excited, the accent was quite genuine.

CG Jim Forsberg said that he liked to play different roles. He would talk one way with colleagues and peers, and another way with the fishermen. Forsberg said that he liked to wear different hats. (In fact, Wye stated that he had some 18 hats for different worker roles.)

MS He had a great interest in people and always wanted to fit in. When he was with a scholar, he discussed philosophy, about which he was well read. I’m sure if he was talking with fishermen he adapted to their way of speaking.

CG Did he discuss theory with you?

MS There was constant talk of theory. He would discuss the Ostwald color system and insist that he was quite free within it. But I didn’t agree. I think that color is very intuitive, no matter how much you make gradations and classifications. When it comes to painting, if you have a feeling for it, your own sense tells you what to do rather than having a chart to go by. When it comes to logarithms, you need a chart. But, for me, you don’t need one for color.

(The Ostwald color system is a color space that was invented by the Baltic German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. Associated with The Color Harmony Manual, it comprises a set of paint tabs representing the Ostwald color space. There are four different editions of the Color Harmony Manual. Each manual is made up of charts, with each chart being a different color space.)

I found it very rigid. I don’t know how much of an effect it actually had on his painting because he has his own color sense. He has a strong feeling for the French color sense. Many of his works had a French impressionist or post-impressionist feeling. There is a certain thing about the French use of color.

CG He never went to Europe.

MS But his god was Juan Gris and, of course, Cezanne. He had a copy of Kahnweiler’s book on Gris. He loaned it to me and I was delighted to have at it. There was a lot of talk about it because I read it, then one or two others of our circle also read it. Cubism was his basis, and he tried to work out what he learned from the paintings. He had a library of reproductions.

(Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) was a German-born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and cubism.) 

CG Did you visit his home?

MS Yes. He would get out his latest work and ask, “Tell me what you think? Don’t be nice, just tell me what you think.” He wouldn’t hesitate to say what he thought. He would say, “I like this, but you people are younger and have a different point of view.”

CG Your work was very different. Was there a basis for mutual respect?

MS We shared a basis in cubism. You couldn’t get away from that; it was just too basic. Particularly later in life, he was laying things out with a lot of black lines, which I didn’t agree with. I’m not sure whether I told him that.

CG Jim Forsberg did.

MS We probably talked about it and he likely defended himself. For an artist so involved with theories of color, what was the black line doing there? Jim was probably more direct than I was. Those late paintings were very beautiful. He laid out the color before there were any lines. The color planes were laid out in a more or less cubist manner. To me they were beautifully composed and almost quite satisfying paintings. Then he would go back and start working on them. He had a fine sense of composition but representations of reality, whether it was close representation or not, that was somehow very close to him. He would lay out those paintings in a very beautiful manner with color planes. Then he worked his subject into, over, and through them. The best qualities of the structure by this reworking seemed to me to be weakened and diluted.

There were a lot of things we talked about other than painting. There was a time when (our group) was reading Greek drama. There were Jim and Joan, but it seems that there were more than the four of us. Someone else came. I can’t remember who that might be.

CG Helen (Knaths’s wife) never came.

MS Helen never left the house. When I remodeled this place, I had a big house warming with a hundred people in April 1962. I said, “Karl, bring Helen.” She was something of a recluse. They would take drives and visit Washington, D.C. when he was teaching at the Phillips. She came to the party and had a glass of sherry. Karl said, “I don’t really drink,” then got in a few shots when she wasn’t looking because she didn’t approve of it. She wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. Her interest was music, which she played at home. He maintained an intellectual life apart from their relationship.

CG When you visited, would she be sociable?

MS In her own home, Helen was a charming hostess.

CG Did you ever dine with them?

MS I was never invited and I don’t know of anyone they invited. He generally had apprentices. He often took them in with room and board. He had several rental cottages. It was a good piece of land. There was someone to take care of things and clean the house. They would eat with them and I would hear about that. Helen was a stickler about everything and it had to be just so. Karl had his habits—almost the same routine every day. He got up, took his walk, had breakfast. I didn’t like to take walks on cold mornings, but he said it was good for you. I tried it once, and didn’t know at the time that I was beginning to have arthritis. I came home in terrible shape all that day. I said, “Karl, it may be fine for you but no good for me.” It was part of his German background.

CG As a teenager he was apprenticed to an uncle, a baker.

MS I remember Karl saying something about that. He was late to attend art school and was slow about a lot of things. Then he went to New York, where he knew people from both places.

CG This is where Ross Moffett comes in. He also went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where they knew each other, as well as later in New York. It was Moffett who suggested that Karl come to Provincetown.

MS Is that how it was? Yes, he was close to Moffett.

CG Did you know Moffett?

MS Yes, but I wasn’t close to him. I knew him best in his last years because he came on staff at Fine Arts Work Center. He was dying then and in bad shape. I knew that they had been close, not then, but in the early years.

CG The same was true with Edwin Dickinson.

MS Oh yes, he had fallen out with practically everyone. All the local artists he felt were old fogies and he told them so before I was around. You know the whole story of the division (modern vs. traditional). Ambrose Webster was one (modernist) and they stuck with Karl. When Charles Demuth was here, he was singular while the rest of them were Hawthorne students and academicians according to Karl.

CG Edwin Dickinson was a Hawthorne student.

MS Yes, a favorite student, and certainly well known.

CG Did you know Dickinson?

MS Yes, I knew him. He was about the same age as Karl.

CG Karl died in 1971 (born October 21, 1891)

MS Helen died just four or five years ago.

CG She lived to be 105.

MS I wasn’t surprised. As you know, she never did anything.

CG She was some 18 years older than him.

MS Yes, way older. Her sister Agnes I believe was younger. (Agnes Weinrich 1873–1946 was an artist. Today her work is highly regarded.)

CG Many people comment that they were surprised that he married Helen and not Agnes.

MS I heard him speak of Agnes more often than of Helen. He respected her work, which is based on cubism that she studied in Paris with Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). From friends I got the impression that he was in love with Agnes, but she persuaded him that Helen was the one he should marry. It was peculiar, and I could never decide if it was a real marriage. They got along.

I don’t ever think it was a love match. We had great respect for her and treated her well. She had a sense of humor and could laugh about some of his foibles. When he said something, she looked at me and when he left the room she grinned. But it was not an unkind thing, but I never saw it as a sign of affection. I felt there had been an accommodation of some kind. Before she died, he had Agnes in the house as a fellow artist and Helen as his wife. He had Agnes as a colleague and painter. The death of Agnes was a great blow to him, though I did not know him at the time.

CG When did you come to Provincetown?

MS I first came in 1938 but didn’t return until 1946.

CG Were you here for Forum ’49?

MS I was here for part of it. Late in the summer I went to Europe. I remember several of the forums, including one where Karl was a speaker. He was interested in all that was going on because that was the beginning of the avant-garde. That was the summer when Life Magazine published an article on Jackson Pollock with big lettering that asked, “Is This Art,” or something like that.

CG Do you consider yourself to be an abstract expressionist? Where do you fit in?

MS I was never at all an abstract expressionist. I was an abstract artist. In the beginning I worked both ways. My teaching was very liberal right from the beginning. My teachers were open to everything.

CG Who did you study with?

MS I studied with a man called Chris Martin. I learned by reading Meyer Shapiro, who he had studied with. Martin was at Teachers College of Columbia. It was the most advanced art department in the country from the time when it was started by Arthur (Wesley) Dow.

(Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1857 and died in 1922.  In 1884, he went to Paris for his early art education, studying at the Académie Julian under the supervision of the academic artists Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. In 1893, Dow was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Ernest Fenollosa, who introduced him to ukiyoe, the woodblock prints of Japan, which greatly influenced his later works.

He taught art at Pratt Institute from 1896 to 1903, and the New York Art Students League. In 1900, Dow founded the Ipswich Summer School of Art. From 1904 to 1922, he was a professor of fine arts at Columbia University Teachers College.)

He was the teacher of Georgia O’Keeffe. He was Charles Martin’s professor, who taught me. He taught here in the summer. I hadn’t finished the course and he said come and study with me and I will give you the credit if you come and paint some. So, I came and painted with him in 1938. I didn’t come back until after the war. Having stayed for the summer, I decided to stay on in the winter.

As time went on, Jim and Joan Forsberg broke up, but I continued to work with Karl some and Angie Meyer, who was helping with the translations. We would get together in the afternoon during the week. I lived then just up the street before I came here. During the 1950s and 1960s, I saw Karl with great regularity. As the 1960s went on, I saw less and less of him. He was ill and eventually died. I didn’t know he was ill until he was quite ill. It came as a surprise. as he was always healthy with a big frame and ruddy country cheeks.

CG Can we talk about your work and how you came to be a non-objective artist?

MS I don’t know how best to describe myself. From the beginning I worked both abstractly and from nature. I was a landscapist, which I liked very much, which I painted a great deal. After the war I attended Hofmann’s class on the GI Bill. I began to work abstractly and found it very satisfying. No matter how abstractly I worked, I still liked to work with models and landscapes.

CG When did you start to work non-objectively and what was Hofmann’s role?

MS In 1946. It was perfectly natural to me. The abstract mode satisfied me. Hofmann was the most remarkable teacher I have ever known. He was not only himself a fine painter, he also knew how to project his meaning, intentions, and understanding. His classes were remarkable because they included people who were working in all different ways. He took people who worked naturalistically, impressionistically, abstractly, expressionistically, it didn’t matter to him. He knew where you were and he had the ability to start from there and show you where it was possible to go on.

CG Do you recall artists who were fellow students at that time?

MS A lot were the younger abstract expressionists like Mack Goldberg, Richard Stankiewicz, Larry Rivers. There were so many of them who were already different and they went on in their own ways. There was my good friend Jan Müller, who went on to be a figurative expressionist.

CG I notice that you have a small Jan Müller which is stunning. Did you know Bob Thompson, Jay Milder, and the Sun Gallery artists?

MS Yes, they were a bit younger. Bob was a friend of mine. It was John Frank who first brought him. We had a cooperative gallery one summer and John Frank was its director. He was teaching in Louisville and he brought Bob Thompson from there. It was Gallery 256. It went on to different incarnations with different artists. We nearly all withdrew and showed with Nat Halper’s HCE gallery.

CG How old were you when you had your first New York show?

MS I had my first one-man show at Stable Gallery in 1954. By then I was older, compared to other artists. I was born in 1908 and graduated from college in 1930. I had a job teaching school which lasted for three years. During my last semester in college, I took a painting course and got hooked. That was at North Texas State University. I graduated with a double major in history and English.

I went back and did a complete undergraduate course in art. From there I went to graduate school. I finished in 1938 and managed to get a good job, but the war ended that. I was painting, but during the war that wasn’t possible. I dropped out of painting and didn’t get back into it until after the war, when I went to Columbia. My friend said I couldn’t stop painting and urged me to come study with Hofmann. Once more I was on my way.

CG Did you sell anything in that 1954 show?

MS Not a thing, but I had the GI Bill for income. I served in the Pacific, but didn’t see combat. First, I was in the Army, then the Air Force. I stayed on in New York into the next year, but the Stable Gallery director wasn’t doing anything for me. My friends asked me to join Hansa Gallery on Twelfth Street. This is when all the galleries were in Tenth Street. I declined because I thought I had a chance to show uptown. But when nothing happened, I left Stable and joined Hansa. When we closed Hansa, Richard Bellamy started Green Gallery. He has represented me all this time and the gallery is now known as Oil and Steel. There was a time in between when he dealt privately, but he still represented me. I never had but two people that represented me in my entire career.

CG I noticed from labels for your MIT show that the works were dated over a long time. Is this typical of how you work?

MS Yes, that’s true. I keep a lot of paintings going.

CG The labels give the impression that you work on a painting for ten years.

MS But you don’t work on it for ten years. You work on it over a period of ten years, or twenty. But the painting may be put away for a long time. There are paintings I first laid down in the late 1950s. There were two in the Whitney show that I didn’t finish until 1979.

CG How do you decide that a painting is finished?

MS That’s part of the business of putting it away. This idea of working on paintings for a long time started when I began to work in black and white and paintings with shapes more than in a geometrical way.

CG The earlier paintings were more patterned and colored like those I saw at MIT.

MS Yes, and for the most part they didn’t take that long, just an average amount of time. When I got into black and white, it slows down and took longer to realize what they had to be.

There comes a time when you wear out being concerned with it. So, it is time to put it away and take out something else. Take out something and work on it for months or perhaps just a few weeks. Put that away and take out something else. It doesn’t make for being a prolific painter.

CG Can you estimate how much you have produced?

MS No, but probably not as much as most painters. But I was also making drawings, the black and white charcoals. They are like paintings because they are so completely realized. They are not just drawings. I was also working on them all the time as well. There have been many more black and white drawings, but I can’t tell you how many.

(I saw a show of the drawings around that time at the gallery of Fine Arts Work Center.)

CG Do you ever destroy work?

MS I do on occasion. I have work that’s experimental where I have gone in different directions. I wasn’t satisfied and never showed it. I still have work of that kind.

CG You went in your own direction. Was there anyone at the time working in a similar manner?

MS The group American Abstract Artists (AAA) has been together since the 1930s. They worked abstractly and, for lack of a better term, hard edge. That’s a terrible term. It may be a clear or clean edge, but I don’t like the implication of hard.

CG Do you mean artists like Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996), Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981) and Nassos Daphnis (1914–2010)?

MS Bolotowsky was part of the original group, as was Perle Fine (1905–1988, she studied with Hofmann in New York and Provincetown). It was quite a good-sized group.

CG Were you a member?

MS Someone put me up in the 1950s, but they turned me down. Later they invited me, but I wouldn’t join.

CG Were you hurt by being rejected?

MS One is never pleased by being turned down. I wasn’t that upset because I didn’t care for most of the work. I don’t think Leon Polk Smith was a member, as he was younger when he came along. I recall meeting and talking with him. We were acquaintances. Nearly all of them stayed close to Mondrian’s neo-plastic ideas. I felt that was dogmatism that didn’t serve any useful purpose. That’s why I was happier to go my own way and find what I needed. I’ve worked in a very rigorous neo-plastic way, rigorous neo-classical say, so to speak.

CG The earlier works in color?

MS No, not at all, they were all Mondrianesque, but often in the charcoal drawings. Bolotowsky, for example, kept very close to the neo-plastic thing, even with the constructions that he made. I felt they were inadequate. I didn’t like the direction that Fritz Glarner (1899–1972) went in. Who was the other artist who painted quite beautifully?

CG Nassos Daphnis? 

MS Nassos is an old friend of mine. He came and showed with us at Gallery 256 in 1954. I had many friends among the hard-edge painters. I had great respect for them. For my own work, however, I had to find it for myself.

CG Where does Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) fit in?

MS I never even saw his work because he was living in Paris. When he came back, I didn’t know him.

CG Jack Youngerman (1926–2020)?

MS I knew his work, and saw Kelly’s at the Whitney. I thought it showed great promise. Of course, now I can’t see anyone’s work because I can’t see any longer, in the way that I really need to see it in order for it to register. But Kelly’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, he’s a remarkable artist, but I felt a lack of personal content. A depth of content, so to speak, that was not satisfying. But I don’t like to be critical of artists who are alive and whom I respect as artists.