The figurative paintings of John Barnes Dobbs (1931-2011)

This morning I was flipping through a Slotin Folk Art Auction from 2014 and ran across a painter I wasn't familiar with, John Dobbs. His style is very much Northern California figurative but it turns out he was a New Yorker through and through. Whats interesting is he maintained his love of figurative painting in the 40's and 50's while the winds of "abstract expressionism" were blowing all around him. I can only imagine how he was viewed by the "modernists". He must have dealt with it much as Fairfield Porter did, he stayed true to himself and just kept working. Here is an excellent obituary from the Examiner.

"John Barnes Dobbs, a determinedly figurative painter who launched his career in the 1950s against the prevailing winds of Abstract Expressionism, lived to see a time when Realism would coexist with Abstraction, Minimalism, Conceptual Art and a variety of other artistic movements. On August 9 Dobbs died at his home in New York’s Greenwich Village at the age of 80.

During a career that spanned more than half a century, Dobbs painted his own dusky vision of humanity: figures embedded—more often than not—in an alienating, modern landscape of city and suburb. The people on his canvases are often seen in the distance or from behind, as if departing. They ride up escalators, wait on subway platforms or pass through turnstiles. We glimpse their silhouettes through plate glass windows or in the glare of sun on concrete.

In his final works, Dobbs’ figures appear against flat backgrounds, iconic as the images on tarot cards: acrobats, boxers and contortionists, struggling against the physics of their own bodies and that of the universe.

Dobbs had many solo shows at galleries, universities and museums. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, and the Salon Populiste in Paris. Dobbs’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; the Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH and the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, MA.

From 1972 to 1996, he was a Professor of Art at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was a member of the National Academy, to which he was elected in 1976.

Born in 1931 in a small house by the Lackawanna Railroad in Nutley, New Jersey, where his grandfather had once worked as a railway express clerk, Dobbs grew up in a politically engaged family of artists, musicians and poets. Yet he credited the shining rails that ran past their little house with giving him his first lesson in one-point perspective. Although he studied with several painters during his twenties, he always referred to himself as a “self-taught” artist.

At 18, after graduating from high school, Dobbs hoisted a duffle bag onto his shoulder and hitchhiked cross-country. He worked at a variety of odd jobs before returning to the East Coast to study painting with Ben Shahn, Gregorio Prestopino and Jack Levine, who became his mentor and life-long friend.

In 1952 Dobbs was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany. He brought along a sketchbook, which he filled with drawings of soldiers and post-war German life, later published in a chapbook, “Drawings of a Draftee” (1955).

After returning to the United States, Dobbs married French-Algerian literary scholar Anne Baudement and had his first one-man show at the Grippi Gallery in New York in 1959. Four years later, painter Raphael Soyer included Dobbs—along with Edward Hopper, Leonard Baskin, Jack Levine and eight other figurative artists—in his large group portrait, Homage to Thomas Eakins.

Soyer’s canvas was a cri de coeur for 20th century American Realist painting. But, although he and Dobbs became close friends and artistic compatriots, their work developed along different directions. While Soyer devoted himself to painting from life, Dobbs worked from memory and imagination, employing both literal and symbolic imagery to invoke America’s collective preoccupations and dreams.

Those dreams, as Dobbs conceived them, can sometimes be terrifying. In Deodand #2, (1969), painted by Dobbs during the height of the protests against the war in Vietnam, a large revolver points straight at the viewer. Staring down the barrel of the gun is the shadowy face of a helmeted policeman. With its oversized revolver, gripped in huge hands, the work confronts us more directly and aggressively than news footage ever could. The artist is willing to let us squirm before this hyper-realistic nightmare of the American history from which we are still trying to awake.

“I’m not afraid to say I’ve made paintings that can be hard to live with,” Dobbs wrote near the end of his life, responding to often-heard comments that his work is both beautiful and disturbing.

Certainly we can trace Dobbs’ artistic lineage from Goya through George Grosz, those break-and-enter artists who brought fury into the drawing room and have never been entirely forgiven. As with those earlier, socially conscious painters, one senses that the demons that pursued Dobbs were as much personal as political. That’s one reason the sloppy labels “Realist” and “Social Realist” that have dogged him and his circle for decades don’t shed much light on the paintings.

In the unforgettable self-portrait White Mask (1999), Dobbs’ haunting gray eyes stare out of his long, bearded face. They are cool, appraising and unflinching. But instead of a cap on top of his balding head, the artist wears an African totem. It’s a large wooden mask, painted white, the color of death. And its coal-black eyes stare off into an otherworldly, steel-blue distance.

“I am your doppelgänger,” the ghostly second head seems to say, “and I come from a world that’s truer, deeper and more real.”

Dobbs is survived by his wife Anne, sons Michel and Nicolas, and his sister Louise DeCormier and her family. His work is represented by ACA Galleries in New York and George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco".

All works here are courtesy of the artists website and Krevsky Gallery.

Click below to see more of Dobbs work and read a brief autobiographical piece that appeared in The Last Bohemians.

John Dobbs was raised in Boston and Washington. He taught at the Brooklyn Museum and John Jay College. Dobbs and his wife Anne raised two sons at Westbeth.
After the army, I came back to New York City in 1954. The art scene in the mid-1950s was changing with the Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock and the Cedar Street Tavern crowd. I wasn’t taken by the Abstract Expressionists. I was brought up in a different way. I was a figurative painter and went after the figurative painters. A lot of my contemporaries thought I was crazy, that figurative painting was dying. I didn’t care for the new thing. I thought it was a bunch of ink spots painted by space cadets. In a sense, I picked the losing side. Non-objective art didn’t interest me at all. I don’t like the word “abstract.” Non-objective art means there is no reference to anything but the inner voice. Somebody once said that the inner voice is easy to fake. Objective art you can’t fake.

The older figurative painters were glad to see me because the younger painters were going off in a different direction. I made friends with them and they still had a lot of clout. They gave me a lot of assistance and helped me get my first shows.

We lived in France for much of the sixties. In ‘72, I got a job at John Jay College. I taught painting and drawing there until 1996. It took very little time and paid a lot of money.

By 1960, I was attracting private collectors. I started showing at the ACA Gallery in 1965. I’ve sold a lot of paintings. Success to me was whether my paintings were any good, from my own opinion.

I work from ideas and feelings. Since 9-11, I feel the country has been out of whack. Our country has lost its way. Everything we talk about has a false feeling. We are on a tightrope and we are out of balance.

I was opposed to Westbeth at the beginning. I thought it was a bad idea separating the artists from the rest of the people. Artists are a lot better off if they don’t hang out together. However, the rents were right at the time. I was 39 when we moved in. We had two small sons. We met interesting people and made friends that we still have. They expected more turnover with Westbeth, for people who became successful to move out. But to move where?

Edward Hopper painted three or four paintings a year, sometimes less. No gallery would be interested in him today. Some successful artists go into production mode. You have to be able to supply galleries with 100 paintings a year. Also, the galleries are not too happy with changes. I always got in trouble. I’d have a show that would sell out, then two years later, I’d have another show with different, new work. The gallery owner would say, “This is not what you did before.” I’d say, “I did that before. I am doing this now.”