Norman Toynton

Norman Toynton (25 January 1939 – 30 June 2025) was a British abstract painter who lived for many years in the United States, and for "marshal(ling) all the sensuous force of color and oil paint to induce us to look with truly questioning attention". He was the Chair of Fine Arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and exhibited widely in New York and Boston. and participated in the first London happening with Carolee Schneemann at Denison Hall. He was included in the John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, and created an installation piece for the Raume und Environmenten exhibition at the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen with Klaus Rinke. He also showed at the Zwemmer Gallery (with John Walker), the RBA Galleries, and numerous other galleries throughout the UK. He began teaching under the radical art educator Tom Hudson at the Leicester College of Art in 1963 and then joined Hudson at the Cardiff College of Art. Working with Hudson, along with Michael Sandle, Terry Setch and Michael Tyzack, was a formative experience for him. Meanwhile, he had become increasingly interested in the art coming out of the United States, particularly after the Jackson Pollock show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, and his work was tending more towards abstraction.

Career in the United States In 1969, Toynton became the visiting artist at Ohio State University in the U.S; he was then Chairman of the Art Department at the University of Victoria. Later he moved to Boston and became Chair of the Graduate Program in Fine Art at the Massachusetts College of Art. the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Williams College Museum of Art. At the end of this decade he returned to creating smaller paintings, working with the same material he had begun using in his installations: Masonite pegboard, which he described as "moribund, Orwellian... It seems to stand for everything that threatens to destroy painting, the most individualistic, human activity I know of". Pegboard, on which he variously painted directly or hung lushly textured and patterned wooden elements, became his trademark. Many of his paintings consist of series of painted Masonite panels, with subtle variations from one to the next, in order to slow the viewer down and compel close scrutiny.

In a review of one of his solo exhibitions in Artnews, David Bonetti called his paintings "works of such authenticity that they are shocking… Toynton dares to salvage beauty from the banal", Toynton then retreated to rural Vermont, before making several extended trips to India. APT, the Dadiani Gallery and several other London venues, as well as at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Yorkshire Sculpture Park .

On 15 September 2025, it was announced that Toynton had died at his home in Sidestrand, Norfolk, in June, at the age of 86.

Selected collections Alfonso Ossorio Foundation Rose Art Museum JP Morgan Chase Time Warner Other Press Williams College Museum of Art Museum Narodowe, Warsaw, Poland Nottingham City Museum National Library of Wales Bradford Museum

Prizes Lignano Biennale Prize, Italy Prix Chateau de la Sarraz, Switzerland Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant