Paul Burlin

Paul Burlin (1886-1969) was one of the most independent and uncompromising American painters of his generation, an artist whose long career carried him from the celebrated New York exhibitions of the 1910s through decades of experimentation across the American Southwest and Europe. Born in 1886 in New York City, he received his artistic training between 1900 and 1912 at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, supporting himself during those years by working as an illustrator for Delineator, where Theodore Dreiser served as editor. As the youngest artist at the landmark 69th Regiment Armory Show of 1913, Burlin created quite a stir, exhibiting alongside the likes of Monet, Picasso, Manet, and Degas.

Between 1913 and 1920, Burlin lived in Santa Fe, where he became fascinated with primitive art and particularly with the rich culture of the Pueblo Indians. Together with his wife at the time, the ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis, Burlin became closely involved with the local tribes, and he began incorporating the colors and distinct geometric qualities of Pueblo work into his own paintings as well as producing portraits of Indian subjects. The southwestern spirituality that he absorbed during those years persisted in his work long after he moved away from the West. The brochure for his 1946 exhibition observed that "the magic itself of the painting aims to destroy visual reality and the primitive colors shape themselves into a reality of their own."

Burlin was known throughout his career for the aggressive, unsentimental undercurrents that pulsed through his work. He painted in a way that challenged mass consumer-based identity and reflected what he perceived to be the "palsy of the American spirit" that he saw as ubiquitous during his lifetime. He famously observed that he could not be satisfied with a piece unless he could locate within it "an arrogance that says to hell with all reasonableness but this." Burlin subsequently lived and exhibited across Europe and North Africa. From 1949 to 1960, he taught and worked as a visiting artist at colleges throughout the United States, before retiring to live in New York City and spend his summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts.