Gerald Coarding

Gerald Coarding (1911-1986) was an American painter whose mature work belongs to the rich moment in mid-twentieth-century American abstraction when a group of New York painters set out to reimagine Cubism and Surrealism through the flattened compositional structures and symbolic vocabularies of Native American, pre-Columbian, and other indigenous artistic traditions. Working during the 1940s and 1950s, when American painters were increasingly interested in finding a distinctively New World basis for modern art, Coarding shared this generation's belief that the deep visual heritage of the Americas offered a serious alternative to the European inheritance that had dominated the first decades of American modernism.

His paintings of this period are characterized by strong flat planes of color, mask-like profile figures, and richly decorative background patterns drawn from indigenous textiles, ceramics, and glyph systems. Working in a palette that favored earthy reds, ochres, yellows, and grays punctuated by graphic blacks and whites, Coarding produced compositions that combined the structural clarity of Cubism with the totemic power of much older visual traditions.

He exhibited during his active career and built a following among American collectors of modernist painting. His paintings are appreciated today as thoughtful contributions to a particularly inventive chapter of American art, produced by an artist committed to reconciling modernist form with the deeper cultural heritage of the Americas.