Robert Arthur Goodnough

Robert Goodnough (1917-2010) was an American painter closely associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists, whose distinctive fragmented compositions of floating geometric forms established a personal voice within the crowded field of postwar American abstraction. Born in Cortland, New York, he studied at Syracuse University before serving in the United States Army during the Second World War. After the war he pursued graduate studies at New York University with the French Purist Amédée Ozenfant, earning his master's degree, and he also studied intensively with Hans Hofmann at Hofmann's Provincetown school.

Goodnough emerged as a significant voice in the postwar New York art community in the early 1950s. He was included in the landmark Talent 1950 exhibition, curated by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, and in the historic Ninth Street Show of 1951 that first announced the New York School as a coherent movement. Alongside his painting practice, he wrote extensively for ARTNews magazine, contributing important early accounts of the working methods of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other first-generation Abstract Expressionists.

Goodnough developed a signature vocabulary distinct from the gestural fields of many of his contemporaries. His mature paintings characteristically consist of small, brightly colored geometric shapes scattered across the canvas in loose constellations, producing compositions that hover between abstraction and evocation, and that seem to gather and disperse like flocks or shifting weather. Represented for many years by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, he taught at Cornell, New York University, and other institutions, mentoring younger painters over a long career that continued into his nineties. His paintings are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections.