Justin McCarthy (May 13, 1891July 14, 1977) was a self-taught American artist. His work is in many important collections, including those of the

American Folk Art Museum The American Folk Art Museum is an art museum in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, at 2, Lincoln Square, Columbus Avenue at 66th Street. It is the premier institution devoted to the aesthetic appreciation of folk art and creative expressions of ...

, the

Milwaukee Art Museum The Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) is an art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its collection contains nearly 25,000 works of art. Location and Visit Located on the lakefront of Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee Art Museum is one of the largest art museu ...

, the Petullo Collection, the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

, and the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

. ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' has praised his "paintings and drawings of gestural force and narrative interest." McCarthy's imagery anticipates the Pop art of the 1960s.

Life and work

McCarthy lived for almost his entire life in the small town of

Weatherly, Pennsylvania Weatherly is a borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania and is located northwest of Jim Thorpe and south of Wilkes-Barre. The population was 2,525 at the 2010 census. History Originally called "Black ...

, where his family was well established (a patrician background uncommon among self-taught artists). He failed his second year exams while in law school at the University of Pennsylvania, which led to a severe mental breakdown, after which he was institutionalized for years before returning "to his family's decayed mansion, where he lived with his mother."For the fact that the breakdown followed on the failure of his exams, see any of the references (except Hughes). This breakdown saved him from the trenches of World War I, but considerably reduced his professional prospects. McCarthy then turned to art as a therapeutic outlet from the menial work he was limited to by his precarious mental health. His mother died in 1940, leaving him alone in the big, dilapidated house (which was grand enough to have its own theatre for the staging of plays). His art depicts figures from popular culture as well as animals, biblical scenes, and everyday life. Pictorially, he had a predilection for glamorous women—movie stars, fashion models, and other celebrities—as well as sports heroes. This interest in popular culture was not uncommon among American artists in the 1920s: both Stuart Davis and Gerard Murphy incorporated the visual argot of advertising into a bright Cubist syntax. Unlike these proto-Pop artists, however, McCarthy's style is expressionist, with a highly gestural and textured appearance that readily calls to mind works by European masters such as

Emil Nolde Emil Nolde (born Hans Emil Hansen; 7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the ...

and

Chaïm Soutine Chaïm Soutine (13 January 1893 – 9 August 1943) was a Belarusian painter who made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living and working in Paris. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the ...

. (The most significant early "discoverer" and promoter of McCarthy's art, Sterling Strauser, characterized his style as "naive expressionist.")

Notes

References

External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:McCarthy, Justin 1891 births 1977 deaths Painters from Pennsylvania American Expressionist painters 20th-century American painters American male painters People from Carbon County, Pennsylvania Outsider artists 20th-century American male artists