Myron Stout

Myron Stout was born in 1908 in Denton, Texas. While he decided to be a painter earlier on in his life, he spent some years working as a teacher and in the Army during World War II, later returning to artmaking under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann in 1947. He began exhibiting his works in 1952 and had a solo exhibition with the Hansa Gallery in 1957, which started his long-lasting business relationship with renowned art dealer Dick Bellamy.

In 1954, Myron Stout began creating his black and white paintings, his most celebrated series, described by Henry Geldzahler as “ecstatic contemplative, and even as ecstatic indefinite (in the sense of edge).” Inspired by his deep interest in Greek mythology—often alluded to through the titles he gave those very works—and his earlier ventures in graphite drawings, Stout created these bichromatic compositions extracted from Stout’s understanding of ancient Greek literature. His expert balance of white form and black ground blurs the lines between foreground and background, creating a captivating canvas of transcendent abstract form and engendering an experience akin to encountering a mythical being. It is also worth knowing that Stout would work on these paintings for decades and called many of his works “unfinished,” hinting at how the artist was motivated by an almost religious dedication that spanned nearly the entirety of his working life.

In his lifetime, Stout was the subject of five important exhibitions, including his solo institutional exhibitions Myron Stout: Paintings and Drawings at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, and Myron Stout at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Testament to the intellectual rigor and unique aesthetics of Stout’s practice, his works are represented at important museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.