Lot 277
Philip Geiger
American, (b.1956)
woman holding toy
oil on board
Signed lower right.
Provenance: From the private collection of Ian and Mimi Rolland, Ft. Wayne, IN
Biography from The Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia: Philip Geiger was born in 1956 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He studied with Barry Schaztman at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. After receiving a BFA in painting in 1978, Geiger moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where he was accepted into the Yale University graduate program in fine arts.
At Yale, he studied with the realist painter William Bailey, whose method of de-objectifying recognizable subject matter for the sake of the painting impressed Geiger. However, the student was increasingly drawn to the methods of another teacher, Rackstraw Downs, who encouraged Geiger to avoid neoclassical formulas and the tendency to adopt a style. Rather, he inspired his students to work directly from observation. In 1980, Geiger received an MFA from Yale. (1)
Today Geiger works within the tradition of American Romantic realism, a painterly style of contemporary genre painting, the origin of which can be partly traced to the paintings of Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, but with deeper roots in the more abstract and tonal compositions of French painter Edward Degas and Nabis artists Pierre Bonnard and Jean-Edouard Vuillard.
While Geiger's domestic scenes communicate some of the loneliness and isolation captured by Hopper, he does not imbue his figures with the same sense of malaise, powerlessness and pathos. Neither does he overly sentimentalize. Rather, in spite of what Jed Perl describes as "choppy brushwork that lends an overall animation," (2) Geiger paints a serene environment of arrested emotions, relayed partly through his strong sense of design and painterly technique. In his paintings Geiger allows the viewer to encounter an ordinary domestic scene, yet he does not divulge the level of detail that would permit complete a story. His narratives are open-ended and left for the viewer to complete. Stephen Margulies describes the artist's interiors as "radiantly peopled…lovely desolate, sublimely mundane, where the ennui or even enervation of the ordinary middle-class inhabitants is perhaps a submission to the ecstasy of texture and light… We inevitably try to extract a story, a narrative, from the rich evasive reality of paint, which gives and withholds like a poem by John Ashbury." (3)
Sources include:
1. From an interview with the artist, March 26, 2002.
2. Jed Perl, "What There Was To See," The New Criterion (June 1993), 49.
3. Stephen Margulies, "Philip Geiger's Paintings: Scenes from the Crime," Meridian, The Semi Annual of the University of Virginia (Fall, 1999, No. 4).
Submitted by the staff, Columbus Museum
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Dimensions:
- 19 1/2"H x 15 1/2"W (sight), 26 1/2"H x 22 1/2"W( frame) Artist Name:
- Philip Geiger Medium:
- oil on board
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