John Havens Thornton Estate

John Havens Thornton

(1933-2021)

John Havens Thornton was born in Mexico City to American parents on December 20th, 1933, but grew up in New Jersey, where he attended Princeton University. Alongside classmate Frank Stella (1936 – 2024), it was at Princeton that a young Thornton first studied painting under William C. Seitz (1914 – 1974), a staunch champion of Abstract Expressionism who would help form Thornton’s early development as a painter. After graduation, he continued his artistic training in 1957 at the Arts Student League in New York with the abstract painter Ralston Crawford (1906 – 1978), a leading proponent of the Precisionist art movement in the US during the 1920s and 30s. The Arts Students League was one of the chief training grounds for the early-career Abstract Expressionists, whose work Thornton admired. In 1958, he progressed to the National Academy of Design. While in New York, Thornton fully digested works of the New York School abstract expressionists and minimalists, in particular, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. While minimalism is the catch-all operative word to characterize his work of this period, Thornton stood out from his contemporaries with his precisionist-influenced forms and emphasis on color and geometric forms. In 1967, Thornton was invited to submit a work for the “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The list of artists who exhibited at the Whitney show reads like a veritable Who’s Who in American Art. His painting hung on the wall alongside his Abstract Expressionist mentors such as Willem de Kooning and his vanguard Pop Art contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), James Rosenquist (1933 – 2017) and Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987).

Throughout the 1970s, Thornton was granted one-person shows at The School of Art at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, as well as several other museums of note. In the 1980s, Thornton turned to linear perspective and three-dimensional space for the first time. Through a series of untraditional still life pictures, he arranged colorful boxes, balls, doors, stairways and architectural building blocks in lifeless landscapes that almost recall the sense of the uncanny of a Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978) painting.

John Havens Thornton passed away on April 16th, 2021.

Excerpted from an essay on John Havens Thornton by Vallots Gallery, 2024.

This group of paintings from his estate are from the mature and most important period of his work.