John Opper (1908-1994)

Born in 1908 in Chicago, John Opper moved with his family to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1916.  In high school, he began studying art and attending classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

After graduation, he enrolled in the Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Art), only to withdraw after a year and move to Chicago, where he took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He eventually returned to Cleveland, enrolling at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve), receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1931. The Depression has taken hold during this period, so Opper found work by teaching metalworking and sketching classes at the Karamu Settlement House, the oldest African American theater in the United States.

In 1933, Opper traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, eventually connecting with the artist Hans Hofmann, who was teaching at the school run by Ernest Thurn. Hofmann encouraged Opper to work “in a more modern vein and start finding what it’s all about.” Heeding this advice, Opper relocated to New York, co-founding a mail-order club of American and British prints for dissemination to schools and museums.

By the mid-1930s, he joined the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Easel Division, and also began attending the 57th Street school that Hans Hofmann had established after leaving the Art Students League. Looking back at his time at the school, Opper felt that beyond Hofmann’s teaching, most advantageous was his contact with fellow artists, including Byron Browne, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, and George McNeil. At the time, he also met Giorgio Cavallon and the sculptor Wilfrid Zogbaum.

In 1936, Opper became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, along with Balcomb and Gertrude Greene. The organization was formed to provide an opportunity for artists to show abstract works at a time when such opportunities were scarce. This led to his first solo show in 1937 at the Artists’ Gallery in New York.

During his summer in Gloucester in 1933, Opper came to know Milton Avery.  Painting in Avery’s informal studio in New York City the following winter, he became acquainted with Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. Opper participated in a couple of shows during the 1930s of the American Artists Congress Against War and Fascism, whose president was Stuart Davis. About the same period, Opper joined the Artists’ Union and served as the business manager of its publication, Art Front.

During World War II, Opper worked for a ship design company creating drawings for piping systems used in PT boats. In 1945, he left New York for a teaching job at Women’s College, University of North Carolina. That post was followed by similar positions at the University of Wyoming and the University of Alabama, before returning to New York in 1949, where he taught at Columbia University and completed his doctorate. In the evening, he taught at the Pratt Institute, in the company of several leading New York artists, including Franz Kline and Tony Smith.

With his wife Estelle and two children, Opper again left New York from 1952 to 1957, in favor of a position with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Despite his absence from New York, Opper made frequent trips back, never failing to gather with friends such as Kline, Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, and Willem de Kooning at the Cedar Bar.

In 1955, Opper had a solo exhibition of abstract works at Egan Gallery in New York. In a review in Art News, Parker Tyler referred to Opper as a “substantial member of the New York School” who had exploited “its fusion of free rhythms and hieroglyphics with Cubism’s standard analysis of space and object.” By the summer of 1957, Opper was back in New York, where he joined the faculty of New York University, remaining until he retired in 1974 as professor emeritus.

Opper found a large studio in a former YMCA building on the Bowery. He partitioned off the third-floor space into two studios and offered the second space to James Brooks. When Opper had a heart attack in 1966, he moved one floor down to minimize the flights of stairs rather than give up his studio, which he kept until he died. The illness also made him switch permanently from oil to acrylic paint.

In 1962, Opper bought a house in Amagansett, Long Island, and began construction on a studio.   Upon completion, he split time between Amagansett and the Bowery studios. In 1988, he began spending the winter months in Sarasota, Florida, where he established yet another studio.

Throughout his long career, Opper showed with several well-known New York galleries. In 1959, Eleanor Ward invited him to the Stable Gallery. He left the gallery in 1962, following the advent of Pop Art. Starting in the mid-1960s, Opper was represented by the Grace Borgenicht Gallery.

Opper’s work is in numerous American museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Milwaukee Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.  Among his awards are the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1969; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1974; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Jimmy Ernst Award, 1993.

Opper continued to paint until his death from a heart attack in New York City in 1994.

Source: Berry Campbell Gallery