John Little

John Little (1907-1984) was born in Alabama, and as a teenager attended the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy from 1924 to 1927. Soon after, he moved to New York, where he began operatic vocal training and opened what became a very successful textile business designing fabric and wallpaper. In 1933 he began classes at the Art Students League with George Grosz, painting mainly Cezannesque landscapes. In 1937 he started working with Hans Hofmann in both New York and Provincetown, an experience that pushed him toward abstraction and marked his first serious involvement as a painter. At Hofmann's school he met artists such as Lee Krasner, George McNeil, Gerome Kamrowski, Giorgio Cavallon, and Perle Fine, connections that would shape his artistic community for decades. In 1942 he went into military service as a navy aerial photographer.

After the war, Little returned to New York and, with nowhere to stay, moved into Hans Hofmann's 8th Street studio, where his neighbors were Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. The paintings of the late 1940s reveal great experimentation and a growing interest in Surrealist automatism, Picasso, and the theories of Hans Hofmann. In 1946 Little was given his first one-man show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, with a follow-up solo show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, placing him within the roster of one of the most important galleries of the emerging New York School. In the early 1950s Little abandoned the flat, linear style of the 1940s in favor of new works painted in thick, gestural buildups of paint. He also began a series of constructions created from driftwood and beach-combing detritus.

In 1951, the year he painted Moon Passage, Little moved to East Hampton, where he maintained a close friendship with Pollock. The two artists had a joint exhibition in 1955 at Guild Hall. In 1957 Little helped found the Signa Gallery, an important outpost in East Hampton for the growing New York art scene and host to many influential exhibitions during its brief but important run.

Little continued to actively exhibit until the end of his life. He had solo exhibitions at, among others, Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948, Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1957 and 1958, Worth Ryder Gallery in 1963, and A.M. Sachs Gallery in 1971, along with a retrospective at the Guild Hall Museum in 1982. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guild Hall Museum, the Ball State University Museum of Art, and Galerie Beyeler, among others.