The Art of John Dos Passos

“John Dos Passos not only was one of the most important writers of the post-World War I ‘lost generation,’ but a talented painter whose work was hung alongside paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.”

– Newsday

“His visual art shows us another aspect of his open and inquiring mind.”

– Jay Williams, curator of the Morris Museum of Art

Noted author of such prized works of American fiction as Manhattan Transfer (1925) and The USA Trilogy (1930-1936), John Dos Passos also enthusiastically pursued a career as a visual artist for over 50 years. Dos Passos began sketching in earnest while still in his teens, and in 1913 attended the fabled Armory Show in New York City, which introduced Americans to the groundbreaking work of Van Gogh, Picasso, Duchamp, Munch, and other artists of the European avant-garde. Dos Passos soon developed a unique and wide-ranging style of his own, incorporating ideas from Matisse and Picasso as well as traits of Impressionism and Expressionism. In 1923—years before he wrote the novels that would make him famous—Dos Passos had his first public exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club, mainly watercolors of his travels in Spain and Western Europe, where he had served as an ambulance driver in the First World War.  Over the next five decades, as his political views moved to the right and his literary career waned, his vivid paintings, sketches, book illustrations, and set designs won him a highly respected parallel career as a visual chronicler of 20th century daily life.

This exhibition of 66 watercolor paintings and six illustrated dust jackets vividly chronicled his travels as a social revolutionary, with colorful landscapes and portraits that provide a rare commentary on an exciting era.

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