Fuller Potter

Fuller Potter (1910 - 1990) was an American Abstract expressionist artist. He was born in New York City in 1910, attended St. Bernard's School in New York and Groton School in Groton, Mass. Fuller Potter lived most of his life in his Ledyard, Connecticut estate, near Old Mystic, Conn. He started painting in the traditional modes of representation, specializing in still lives and landscapes. He showed his work in New York in the 1930's at the Marie Harriman Gallery (Inside NYTimes.com, May 19, 1990)

Even in his youth Fuller Potter's pencil and ink drawings projected the strong graphic energy which was to be his hallmark. He spent several of his formative years painting landscapes and portraits in the Southern Appalachia region. After studying painting with Andre Lhote from 1929 to 1931, in Paris, France, then in New York with Walt Kuhn and with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1950, Mr. Potter met Jackson Pollock and changed his mode of painting permanently to abstraction. He had a number of shows in that vein at the Mystic Gallery in Mystic, Conn. When starting his transition towards abstract painting, he combined his graphic skills with his mastery of color, and followed a path that would lead to his artistic peak, during his full abstract expressionist period. Several of his works can be seen at [1].

During the 1940s, his work was still mostly figurative, but showed clear, deliberate avoidance of ordinary representation. His portraits, landscapes and still lives from this period carry true beauty and sophistication.

From the early 1950s on, Fuller Potter's style kept with the early works of Ad Reinhardt and with Jackson Pollock's 1940's pre-drip works.

Jeffrey Potter's To a Violent Grave, a biography of Jackson Pollock's last years, reports that Fuller shared drinking sessions with Jackson Pollock in the mid-1950s. After these encounters, which occupied only a short period of his life, Fuller's work definitively evolved towards a mature and personal form of abstraction.

Fuller Potter never pursued the drip/throw action mode of abstract expressionism to any notable degree. His paint is delivered with loaded brush in hand, opulently, generously and aggressively. His works are insistent and not to be denied.

For Fuller Potter, if a clear structure is underlying or is hidden within an abstract painting, it is to be considered as a kind of figurative representation. Consequently, for Fuller, the pursuit of total abstraction is of the essence, and it requires avoiding the pitfall and disruption caused by a mixture of abstract and figurative styles.

Therefore, the overall structure underlying Fuller's mature paintings will always be abstruse and minimal. This lack of figurative hints aims at heightening and compounding the piece's abstraction. Doing so makes these paintings readily show themselves to the viewer as integrated, authentic and self-powered massive objects.

What gives Fuller Potter's work unity and coherence is precisely the whirlwind trail of colors, the turbulence of shapes, and the sheer, oozing, palpable will to harness these colliding and racing energies. Fuller Potter's best works are so thoroughly worked out, developed to such exquisite richness and subtlety, that their impact leads to extremes of emotion: from disturbing and excruciating feelings, all the way to exhilarating and enraptured states. He held the reins to a ferocious private muse over decades of prolific, secluded, and astonishing creativity.

All abstract expressionists influenced each other during the Fifties, but, whatever derivations or influences may have taken place within this period, an original power is manifest in all of Potter's paintings. Each one conveys its own devastating form of present "energy", an energy which relentlessly insists on imposing itself.

Fuller Potter is considered as one of the major abstract painters of the 20th Century. He died of emphysema in May 1990 at Westerly Hospital in Westerly, R.I. He was 80 years old. He is survived by three sons, Daniel Otis of Stonington, Conn., Paul, of Washington, and Benjamin C.J. of Marion, N.C.; a daughter, Mary Barton Goodman of Morristown, Tenn.; a sister, Polly Balding of Camden, S.C., and two brothers, Charles, of Chicago, and Jeffrey, of East Hampton, L.I.