John Moore

John Moore (born 1941) is an American contemporary realist painter. His art has focused on studio interiors, still lifes, and in his best-known work, cityscapes and the American post-industrial landscape of dilapidated mill towns and factories. He emerged in the early 1970s amid a resurgence of representational work, appearing in many surveys and critical examinations that helped define new modes of American realism. While the highly detailed nature of his work evokes that movement, it diverges from approaches such as photorealism in its social concern, painterly handling and composite compositions, which distill direct observation, sketches, memories and photographs of multiple sites and views into re-imagined but believable scenes. Curator John Stomberg wrote of these constructed worlds: "The image he creates is only real in the painting, yet all the parts do have their origins in the observable world. Therein lies the eerie potency of Moore's vision—its plausibility. He is more of a spectacular fabulist than a realist."

Moore has been recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Academy of Design and has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work belongs to the public collections of those four museums, among others. He lives and works in Belfast, Maine with his wife Sandra, and is Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. He studied mechanical drafting at Ranken Technical College and was hired as a draftsman and technical illustrator at McDonnell Douglas in St Louis in 1960. In 1999 he was appointed chair of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held until retiring in 2009. with early solo shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA, 1973), Fischbach Gallery (New York, 1973–1980) and Alpha Gallery (Boston, 1974). Greenville County Museum of Art (2010) and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2018). "Contemporary American Realism Since 1960" (PAFA, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), "American Realism & Figurative Art: 1952–1990" (Miyagi Museum of Art, Japan, 1991), and "The American Dream" (Drents Museum, Netherlands, 2017).

Moore's early work centered on spare still lifes of ordinary objects on tables that built off modernism and sought to "draw feeling out of geometry." Critics described his still lifes, variously, as "minimal realism verging on the metaphysical," Moore places a contemporary concern for surface design in tension with traditional approaches to representation and spatial recession in order to explore vision and perception, the cultural effects of architecture, geography and social history. In Night Studio (1989), he narrowed on two massive loft windows surrounded by radiators, conduits and fluorescent lights, creating a head-on pictorial grid that framed and captured the subtleties of artificial light meeting a city's night-time ambiance.

In his 2003 show, "Near and Far", Moore made such pictorial strategies explicit in his title and in several complex urban compositions set off by grids of window sash and sill. The New Yorker described one such painting, Tie (2003), as an intricate work achieving "a kind of understated formality, a realism tuned by artifice" as it moved from heavy mullions to slender flights of utility wires and past a construction crane to distant smokestacks evoking a "visual fusillade of eight notes." The cityscapes alternated between vertiginous scenes whose high horizon lines and deep space recalled old-master landscapes (Dutch Pink and Italian Blue, 1992–3) and tighter, street-level depictions (Waiting at St. Cecilia's, 1991–2). New York Times critic John Russell described Moore's approach as impartial, curious and never dull, writing, "His are not generous subjects. Nor do they ever have a hint of paradise regained. His cities have grown up every which way, in a more or less amiable architectural anarchy, and his small towns fight dereliction to a standstill." Art Institute of Chicago, McNay Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

He has been recognized with awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1973, 1988, 1996), National Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1992) and National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities (1966). In 2007, he was elected to the National Academy of Design and was given an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in 2010.