Looking at a Ferren in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958.
Let me tip my hand in the great game of cataloguing: in the back of my brain I have a tag for every artist I have ever tried to sell, a quick bon mot that I deploy near the top of every stand-alone catalogue entry on an artwork, something that a collector can latch onto and trot out at cocktail parties. I’m not proud of this index of one-liners but I’m not ashamed, either: it’s important to be able to distill a big story into a small and memorable bit, and all the better if it plays well over negronis. For Edward Hopper it’s that he painted one picture a year in the 40s and 50s and those pictures inspired the set design of Hitchcock’s Psycho1; Charles Burchfield’s Golden Year was 1917 and Oscar Bluemner called himself a “vermillionaire.” These aren’t mnemonics—I can tell you other things about these painters, too, but how often does the cocktail party get that deep?
John Ferren’s is this: Gertrude Stein said Ferren was the only American in Paris in the 1930s that the French paid any attention to,2 and you know she wasn’t joking around because Ferren helped Picasso stretch the canvas for Guernica.3 He was what the Reverend Wilbert Awdry4 would call a Really Useful; a Special Special.
This has a nice ring to it, and since the top of Ferren’s auction record is dominated by the pictures he made in Paris around the time of the Stein and Picasso anecdotes, it has a breeze of completeness blowing through it. So my article on the Five American Concretionists and Charles Biederman5 perforce mention these incidents, and though they happen to be true, Ferren deserves a bit more . . .
II. More Context.
John Millard Ferren was born in Oregon in 1905, and after a rapid ascent through West Coast ateliers (first with a San Francisco stone-cutter, then at the California School of the Arts), he stopped over in New York on his way to Paris. With stone-cutting on the brain, he initially plied his craft as a sculptor, but, likely after seeing Matisse in Paris, he turned to two-dimensional painting. Ferren’s swirling compositions absorbed elements of synthetic cubism, vorticism, and synchromism, and yet their shimmering, saturated forms are entirely their own thing. Not surprisingly, there’s something very sculptural about his Parisian work: they are abstract insomuch as they depict things that do not exist, but there’s a concrete-ness to them that suggests that they could. This he shared with the other painters that were assembled into the wackily-named Five American Concretionists, and you can see what Ferren had in common with Calder, Gallatin,6 Morris, Shaw7 and Biederman: they were realist painters of abstract sculpture.
These Americans embraced Ferren, and so did the vanguard Europeans of the moment. Ferren married Laure Ortiz de Zarate, the daughter of a Chilean artist, and fell in with the Spanish artists in town—Joan Miró, Joaquín Torres-García, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso was himself in the midst of making very concrete forms in his paintings, and he took the young Ferren under his wing for at least long enough to do the thing with the big important painting mentioned above.
III. Vertigo.
But Ferren’s career didn’t end just then, and the turns it took are both interesting and illuminating.
First, Ferren divorced his Chilean wife and moved back to the US. Gallatin and Morris had supported his work through purchase and exhibition, and he fell in easily with the American Abstract Artists group into which they were very plugged. So far, so good.
Then in 1940, Ad Reinhardt produced a broadside calling out the Museum of Modern Art for their insufficient modernity8, and he put all the names of the AAA group members on it, implying their condemnation of MoMA as signatories—not so good, at least for Ferren. The AAA was organized around the chip on its shoulder, perhaps well-earned, but Ferren didn’t share the group’s feeling of disenfranchisement. And why should he? He had spent most of the previous decade stretching stuff for Pablo Picasso! Anyway, he recoiled from this inclusion, distanced himself from the group and soon began distancing himself from abstraction, at least as the group conceived of it. He reintroduced the figure into his paintings; he released his marks from solid forms and started making paintings more “expressively.” He served with the Office of War Information in North Africa and Europe in World War II, and his state department contacts helped him secure a position, first of its kind, as Artist in Residence in Beirut.9 Along the way, he helped found “The Club,” the informal group of abstract expressionist painters in the Village in the 40s and 50s; he made prop paintings and designed nightmare sequences for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and The Trouble with Harry.10
All of which is to say that while my line about Gertrude Stein and Picasso and the wind of completeness et cetera et cetera is true, it’s really the least interesting thing about John Ferren’s life that one could possibly deploy. His paintings and pastels from 1936-38 are the most valuable in his auction record and I’m glad I have captured that bit of market consensus, but the shocking uptick in interestingness that began after he jettisoned that style raises more questions than it answers. Why are those pictures from the 30s the most valuable? And even bigger: why did the AAA house style turn out to be a dead end?
It is to these incendiary affairs that we turn our humble efforts in seven short days as we discover, “How did Abstract Expressionism cast out Abstraction?”
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
From the depths of our vaults: an article on Hitchcock, Burchfield, and Hopper.
Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Biography, 1937.
Phyllis Tuchman, "Guernica and 'Guernica'," ArtForum, April, 1983.
The creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, obviously.
Our article on Albert Eugene Gallatin here.
Our article on Charles Green Shaw here.
. . . And business practices, too—take a look in hi def at the Library of Congress’s copy.
It’s not as wacky as you might think; the State Department was up to all kinds of weird stuff in these years.
That’s a frame from Vertigo up top, and yes, the grand portrait at center is John Ferren’s contribution.