James Gill

James Francis Gill (born 1934) is an American artist and a proponent of the pop art movement.

In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art included his Marilyn Tryptych into its permanent collection. At the peak of his career, Gill retired. He returned to the art scene around 30 years later.

Life

Early works In 1934, Gill was born in Tahoka, Texas, and grew up in San Angelo. His mother, an interior decorator and entrepreneur, encouraged him to have an artistic interest. In high school, Gill and some friends started a rodeo club to pursue their first dream of being cowboys.

Arising out of a series of anti-war images is the work The Machines. The composition formally joins the media coverage of the United States with the combat conditions in Vietnam. As a draftsman, Gill earned a reputation for handling contemporary issues through photographic images. The combination of his expressionist art and his graphite pencil went against the trend of this time. William Inge described the dark graphite pencil compositions as follows: "His paintings hold a moment of truth, which is of unfortunate beauty and makes memorable". In this way, Gill goes even further than the often apolitical intent of the early movements of pop art. By addressing his paintings for example with the Vietnam War, his works gain an additional socio-critical dimension which provides a much wider range than the mere and superficially not intended criticism of pop art in consumer society.

In 1967, the São Paulo 9 - Environment United States: 1957-1967 in Brazil showed Gill's works with artists such as Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper. This exhibition led to Gill's breakthrough in the international art world. His works were included in the collections of major museums.

In the same year, Gill was asked by Time magazine to portray the Russian Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had just escaped from a Russian labor camp. Gill produced the image as a four-panel quadriptych. The figure transforms from a faceless into a smiling man who has regained his freedom. Gill: "All the people are political prisoners in the way that they are prisoners of the system in which they are born".

The work hung in the lobby of the Time-Life building for around five years.

In 1969, Gill taught at the University of California, Irvine.

In 1970, he was offered a visiting professorship at the University of Oregon. Gill was at the peak of his career, and very popular in the Pop art scene. But many contemporaries saw a profound and complex sense in his works, expressing more than Pop art originally intended: “Gill is a prominent artist of Pop art, although he is too much a painter and treats its subjects in a very emotionally charged way, than only being regarded as a Pop artist".

Withdrawal from the art scene In 1972, Gill went surprisingly into a self-imposed exile, in the expectation of being able to maintain a kind of long-distance relationship with the art scene.

After the professorship in Oregon, Gill sold his house, numerous pictures and drawings, so he could buy land and a house in Whale Gulch in the southern portion of the King Range Wilderness.

Rediscovery Behind the shadow, restudy (2003)Parallel to his work as an architectural designer in Northern California, Gill began again with painting in the mid 1980s. He returned to Texas and developed his art, but without going to the public. However, his life changed dramatically when about ten years later, the art magazine American Way of the Smithsonian American Art Museum called him and asked for an interview. This marked the beginning of his rediscovery, and numerous galleries and museums became aware of him again. Around 1987, Gill started to work with the tools of computer design, using "the computer and the printer as a drawing tool".

Personal life Gill married Antoinette Bower whom he met in Los Angeles in 1962.

Exhibitions (selection) 1962/1964/1966 Alan Gallery, New York City 1963/1965/1967 Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles 1964 Galeria George Lester, Rome 1966 Crocker Gallery, Sacramento, California 1970 Civic Center, Topanga, California 2005 San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, Texas 2012 “L.A. Raw“, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California 2013 art Karlsruhe 2014 ART Innsbruck 2015 Art Southampton, New York 2016 Busan Biennale, South Korea 2017 Museum of the Southwest, Midland, Texas

Works in public collections Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna Museum of Modern Art, New York National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Washington, D.C. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Neue Galerie, Kassel San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, Texas Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Stanford University Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, California Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Honors and awards Art fellowship, University of Texas, 1959 Awarded Purchase Prize, Sixty-seventh Annual American Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1964