Ernest Briggs:
Abstract Expressionist of the 1950s

From dense layers of calligraphic brushstrokes to broad, sweeping passages of luminous color, Ernest Briggs's paintings from the 1950s bristle with the artist's sense of elation at leaving traditional image-making behind. Briggs was an active participant in the later wave of Abstract Expressionism, the revolution in abstract painting that secured New York City's position as the art capitol of the world in the post-World War II period. Also known as "action painting," Abstract Expressionist painting combined a heightened sense of physicality and a grand, heroic scale with the lessons of the European avant-garde-Cubism's rejection of objective reality, Surrealism's 'automatic' approach to drawing, and German Expressionism's experiments in pure, abstract color. The Abstract Expressionists celebrated the performative act of painting and the recording of the artist's subconscious as central themes of their art.

Born and raised in southern California, Briggs studied with the Abstract Expressionist painters Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1946 to 1951. In 1953 Briggs arrived in New York with his own style of large scale, heavily layered gestural abstraction. In his works from the 1950s Briggs combined a raw, unbridled physical application of paint with a highly keyed, lyrical use of color. Briggs sought to eliminate conventional imagery without surrendering a sense of drama, to capture the essence of human emotion and the vitality of nature in abstract terms.

Although Briggs was a strong presence in the New York School, as New York's avant-garde circle of the 1950s was known, his reputation was, like many abstract painters of his generation, overshadowed by the star quality of the Abstract Expressionists who preceded him. In 1954 and 1955 Briggs had solo shows at the Stable Gallery, one of New York's leading venues for avant-garde art in the 1950s and 1960s. He was included in the Whitney Annuals in 1955, 1956 and 1961, and in 1956 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's influential 12 Americans exhibition. From 1961 until his death in 1984, Briggs taught painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he passed along the principles of expressionistic painting to a younger generation of New York artists.

 

© 2002 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College