| Robert Arthur Goodnough | ||
| Birth Date: October 23, 1917 |
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| Death Date: October 2,2010 Artist Gallery |
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| Robert Goodnough, born in 1917, is a painter from Cortland, New York. He studied art at Syracuse University and in 1946/47 with Amedee Ozenfant and Hans Hofmann* in New York City. While in the army, he painted portraits and murals and did art work for information and training manuals.
In 1953 he began to make collages in addition to painting and in 1954 turned to sculpture, making constructions of dinosaurs, birds, and human beings. Goodnough became caught up in the Cubism of Pablo Picasso. He was also attracted by the stark abstractions of Piet Mondrian. He combined these styles in the 1950s with that of Hofmann in a hybrid of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Since that time, Goodnough has been influenced by many abstract directions in art, including collage, sculpted constructions of birds and figures, and hard-edge paintings in the 1950s and 60s. Since the 1970s Goodnough has painted very large geometric, abstract canvases. An artist with an acute color sense, he has made some of the most elegant works of the 1970s.
Concerned with the problems of representing shapes on the picture surface rather than with content, he said; “I try to un-cube the ‘cube’ to create a space which is neither recessive nor advancing, but just special relationships on a single plane.”
*Hofmann, at this time in America, probably had more to do with shifting young American painters away from making art from reality and realist thinking into abstraction than any other teacher of painting.
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