Theodore Appleby

Theodore Franklin Appleby, Jr. (1923-1985) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist associated with the second generation of the movement, whose long career unfolded across both the United States and Europe. Born on January 28, 1923 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to a prominent and successful business family well known in Monmouth County, he attended the Pauling School in New York City and studied at the atelier of John Corneal from 1938 to 1939. On December 12, 1942, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and saw action in 1945 in the Marshall Islands, at Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Engebi. He was later stationed at Yokohama from 1945 to 1946, where he studied Japanese engravings, and remained in the Pacific Theater until his discharge as a Sergeant in 1946.

During a stay in Mexico from 1947 to 1948, Appleby studied monumental mural painting at St. Michele de Allende University. The following year he traveled to Paris, where he regularly visited the atelier of Fernand Léger and was represented every year from 1950 to 1952 in the Salon de Nouvelles Réalités. He became one of the numerous Americans who joined the postwar artistic Parisian scene alongside Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Jackson Pollock, contributing to the ongoing dialogue between American Abstract Expressionism and the parallel movements of European gestural abstraction and Informalism.

From 1955 to 1961, Appleby took part in group exhibitions in Chicago, Leverkusen, Lisbon, London, and Paris, and held three important solo exhibitions during this period: at Studio Facchetti in Paris in 1956, at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1957, and a joint exposition with the American sculptor Ralph Stackpole at the American Cultural Center in Paris in 1959. In January 1957, his work was presented at the 62nd American Exposition of Painters and Sculptors at the Chicago Art Institute, where he was awarded the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal and Prize. Appleby later moved to the South of France, settling in Alba Ardèche until his death, where his pictures continued to combine the confidence and scale of American action painting with the more atmospheric, tonally sensitive palette that came out of his sustained engagement with European painting traditions.