William Ivey (September 30, 1919 – May 17, 1992) was an American
abstract expressionist
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
painter, sometimes associated with the
Northwest School of artists. After stints in the US Army and studying art in California, he spent most of his career in
Seattle, Washington
Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...
. ''Seattle Times'' critic Deloris Tarzan Ament described him as "the Dean of Northwest Painters".
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]
Life and career
William Ivey was descended from early immigrants to the city of Seattle, where he was born on September 30, 1919. Both his parents died when he was young, and he and a younger sister were raised mainly by their maternal grandfather, who was a land developer, and an aunt. Young Ivey often visited the Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...
after its 1933 opening near his grandfather's house, in the Capitol Hill
Capitol Hill, in addition to being a metonym for the United States Congress, is the largest historic residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., stretching easterly in front of the United States Capitol along wide avenues. It is one of the ...
neighborhood. After graduating from Broadway High School he attended the University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington.
Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...
as a law student, while also taking drawing classes at the Cornish College of the Arts
Cornish College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art college in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1914.
History
Cornish College of the Arts was founded in 1914 as the Cornish School of Music, by Nellie Cornish (1876–1956), a teacher of pi ...
. He gradually become more interested in pursuing a career in art, which he'd enjoyed since youth.[Oral history interview with William Ivey, by Barbara Johns, 1983 May 24–31, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.]
His studies were interrupted by the Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Ivey went into the Army, trained as a commando in the First Special Service Force
The 1st Special Service Force was an elite American–Canadian commando unit in World War II, under the command of the United States Fifth Army. The unit was organized in 1942 and trained at Fort William Henry Harrison near Helena, Montana i ...
, and served in the Aleutians, Africa, Italy, and France. In later years he seldom spoke of his wartime experiences, but was known to have sustained a serious abdominal wound.['William Ivey, A Sensitive Mentor And Dean Of Northwest Painters', by Deloris Tarzan Ament, ''The Seattle Times'', Wed. May 20, 1992] While in Italy he was able to view works by Giotto
Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto ( , ) and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/Proto-Renaissance period. Giot ...
, Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was insp ...
, and Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio (, , ; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of hi ...
. After the war Ivey spent three years at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, where he undertook serious study of modern art with such influential instructors as Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately follo ...
, Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Latv ...
, Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement center ...
, David Park, and Clay Spohn. Friends and fellow students included noted painters Richard Diebenkorn
Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he bega ...
and Frank Lobdell
Frank Lobdell (1921 - 2013) was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
Life and career
Frank Lobdell was born on August 23, 1921 in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Mi ...
.[
In the late 1940s Ivey returned to Seattle. He was employed by the city as a social worker, and had a daughter with his wife, Helen Taylor. He painted at night in a series of studios, and entered the ]Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...
's Northwest Annual and the Henry Art Gallery
The Henry Art Gallery ("The Henry") is a contemporary art museum located on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, Washington. Located on the west edge of the university's campus along 15th Avenue N.E. in the University District, it wa ...
's Northwest Invitational shows. He sold his first painting to collector and gallery owner Zoe Dusanne Zoë Dusanne (born Zola Maie Graves; March 24, 1884 - March 6, 1972) was an American art dealer, collector, and promoter who operated the Zoë Dusanne Gallery in Seattle, Washington from 1950 to 1964.
Life and career
Dusanne was born Zola Maie Grav ...
. In 1954 Ivey, Jack Stangle, Ward Corley, and Richard Gilkey
Richard Charles Gilkey (December 20, 1925 – October 3, 1997) was an American painter, often associated with the 'Northwest School (art), Northwest School' of artists. During his long career he became one of the most acclaimed painters in the ...
were featured in an exhibition of Northwest avant-gardists at SAM. He formed friendships with fellow artists such as Guy Anderson
Guy Anderson (November 20, 1906 – April 30, 1998) was an American artist known primarily for his oil painting who lived most of his life in the Puget Sound region of the United States. His work is in the collections of numerous museums inc ...
, Leo Kenney
Leo Kenney (1925–2001) was an American abstract painter, described by critics as a leading figure in the second generation of the 'Northwest School (art), Northwest School' of artists.
Youth
Kenney was born in Spokane, Washington (state), Wash ...
, and Carl Carl may refer to:
*Carl, Georgia, city in USA
*Carl, West Virginia, an unincorporated community
* Carl (name), includes info about the name, variations of the name, and a list of people with the name
*Carl², a TV series
* "Carl", an episode of te ...
and Hilda Morris. In the late 1950s he opened the short-lived Artist's Gallery, Seattle's first co-operative artist-owned gallery, with Alden Mason, James FitzGerald, Margaret Tomkins
Margaret Tomkins (1916–2002) was an American Surrealism, Surrealist / Abstract expressionism, Abstract Expressionist painter. Though born, raised, and educated in Southern California, she spent most of her life in the Pacific Northwest, where s ...
, and others. In 1960, Gordon Woodside became his representative; the same year he received a Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...
grant, and two years later, a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities. In 1964 he had his first major solo show, at the Seattle Art Museum;[ in 1967 he received a Rockefeller Fellowship.]
While Ivey was gaining recognition, and was able to quit his day job, he was notorious for his reluctance to attend opening parties, do publicity, or seek out commissions, and for his gruff, workmanlike approach to painting. "Painting is something you have to do all the time," he told arts journalist Regina Hackett in a 1992 interview. "If you don't, it becomes too important, too charged with meaning, and you can't bring yourself to do it. For me, it's like tying my shoes in a way."['William Ivey had a blue-collar approach to his fine art job', by Regina Hackett, ''The Seattle P.I.'', Thurs. Dec 5 2002]
Ivey also generally disliked teaching, but taught for short periods at the San Francisco Art Institute, Reed College
Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...
, and Highline Community College
Highline College is a public community college in Des Moines, Washington. Highline was founded in 1961 as the first community college in King County, Washington. The main campus covers . , there were approximately 17,000 students and 350,000 alu ...
, and also gave private lessons for small groups at a studio he shared with painter Frank Okada
Frank Okada (1931–2000) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, mainly active in the Pacific Northwest. His mature style often featured brightly colored, off-kilter geometric shapes done in large format, including round canvasses; subtl ...
in downtown Seattle.[
Distaste for promotion likely limited Ivey's popularity – his one and only European exhibition, arranged by painter ]John Franklin Koenig
John-Franklin Koenig (1924 — 2008) was an American artist who, though born and raised in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, and sometimes associated with the 'Northwest School (art), Northwest School' of artists, spent most of his career ...
, was at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1966 – but he remained a respected, strong-selling artist in the Pacific Northwest. SAM held another solo show of his work in 1975; in 1982 he accepted a rare commission and created the largest painting of his career (20' x 8') for the King County District Court in Issaquah, Washington
Issaquah ( ) is a city in King County, Washington, United States. The population was 40,051 at the 2020 census. Located in a valley and bisected by Interstate 90, the city is bordered by the Sammamish Plateau to the north and the "Issaquah Alp ...
;[ in 1983 he was named Artist of the Year by the King County (Washington) Arts Commission, and used the $25,000 reward to build a studio behind his home in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood;][ in 1989 the Henry Art Gallery presented a major retrospective of his career.
Ivey was acquainted with ]Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 – April 24, 1976) was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophi ...
, Morris Graves
Morris Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American painter. He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim. His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, ...
, and other members of the 'Northwest School', and was close friends with Richard Gilkey and many of the Skagit Valley
The Skagit Valley lies in the northwestern corner of the state of Washington, United States. Its defining feature is the Skagit River, which snakes through local communities which include the seat of Skagit County, Mount Vernon, as well as Se ...
-based painters who were considered by some critics to represent a second generation of the Northwest School. However, his deeply personal style of abstraction showed more of the influence of Still, Rothko, and others he studied under at the California School of Fine Arts. He found inspiration in observation of the real world, but his intense immersion in the painting process transformed what he saw into lush abstractions that emphasized color and the picture plane. In Ivey's paintings, shapes are secondary to color in the development of spaces, and delicate neutral grays set off glowing patches of bright color.
In a 2014 review of a show at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, arts journalist Matthew Kangas speculated that Ivey's wartime experiences may have had a strong impact on his art, and suggested that " erhapsIvey channeled — or suppressed — such horrors into modernist abstraction in order to control and tame them."
Ivey rarely titled his paintings. He was an avid fly fisherman, often fishing with his friend and fellow painter Carl Morris.[
He died in Seattle on May 17, 1992, aged 72, after a year-and-a-half long battle with cancer. He was survived by his wife Helen, daughter Kathleen, and two grandchildren.][
Said journalist Hackett, ''"Ivey was a rough-hewn yet lyrical painter interested in feeling, not fact. Within the frame of a canvas, he painted a frame with colors pouring out. He wanted to capture the visual pulse of a scene without bogging it down in particulars. ..He wanted to chip the barnacle of language off purely visual sensations. By blurring them, he hoped to restore them to some kind of original fresh sight. Thus, for all his disclaimers and tough-guy fortitude, he was a romantic to his bones."''][
]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ivey, William
1919 births
1992 deaths
20th-century American painters
American male painters
Artists from Seattle
Painters from Washington (state)
20th-century American male artists