John McLaughlin

John McLaughlin (b. 1898 Sharon, MA; d. 1976 Dana Point, CA) arrived at his painting career relatively late in life, without the primer of art school training. He began painting in his late forties following a long period of travel abroad, both as a civilian and as a military intelligence officer during World War II, including an extended stay in Japan. McLaughlin’s early works approach pictorial representation from a post-Malevich construct. In the 1950s, McLaughlin’s interests shifted from referential, image-dense abstraction to issues of perception and visual experience, initiating what became an all-consuming journey to eliminate the object. Indeed, McLaughlin wrote: “Among other things I consider the following to be objects: symbolism, conclusive ideas, judgments, events, conditions, concepts, forms other than neutral, violent color relationships, textured surfaces, movement, rhythm, and ambiguity.” From this time forward, McLaughlin worked with a vocabulary of simple geometric forms distributed upon monochromatic fields. By the 1960s, McLaughlin’s vision and practice was distilled so as to reveal a remarkable breadth within his disciplined realm of linear elements and subtle variations of hue and tone.

John McLaughlin earned a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1961 and an M.F.A. from SFAI in 1962. His works have been exhibited extensively worldwide, including solo museum exhibitions John McLaughlin: Western Modernism, Eastern Thought at Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), and The Prints of John McLaughlin: Site of Contemplation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA). A major retrospective, John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2017. McLaughlin’s work resides in such permanent collections as Kunstmuseum Winterthur (Winterthur, CH), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), and Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) among many others.

The Estate of John McLaughlin is represented by Franklin Parrasch Gallery.