John McLaughlin

Estate of the artist
Private Collection, Laguna Beach
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1988

Laguna Beach, Laguna Art Museum; Oakland Museum of California; San Antonio, Marion Koogler McNay Institute; Logan, Nora Eccles Harrison Art Museum, Utah State University; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Palm Springs Desert Museum, Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956, July 1990 - January 1992
Newport Beach, Orange County Museum of Art; Andover, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy; Oakland Museum of California; St. Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; Austin, Blanton Museum of Art, Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Mid-Century, October 2007 - May 2009, cat. no. 132

This work is in very good condition overall. There is light scattered surface soiling along the bottom edge. There is a circular area roughly 1 1/2 inches in diameter of light wear to the pigment visible in the lower area of the right black stripe. There is a minor, faint accretion in the upper area of the right white stripe. The black pigmented areas have a slightly irregular finish, likely due to the artist’s working method. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is some evidence of minor inpainting in the grey stripe near the bottom and in the black stripe in the upper left. Framed in artist's frame and encased in a Plexiglas box frame. There is some light wear to the frame, particularly along the edges and corners.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Blankness, quietude, a sense of stasis and possibility, these are only a few words that describe John McLaughlin’s body of work. Intimate in scale, economic in design, and tempered in palette, McLaughlin’s paintings are not characterized by heroics or flair. His is a reductivist aesthetic, achieving the most with the least. Painted in the artist’s Dana Point, California studio, far from the hub of even the budding Los Angeles art scene, McLaughlin’s work is as removed and insular from the exploding Abstract-Expressionist movement happening in New York as it is interconnected. The nuanced influences that have informed McLaughlin’s body of work stretch back as far as 15th century Japanese ink painting and 19th century notions of the ‘sublime’ in Romanticism; they find foothold in the abstractions of Modernist forefathers, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. Although tugging at the various conceptual and aesthetic strings of these predecessors, McLaughlin’s particular brand of West Coast abstraction is without real compare. The blend of formal restraint and esoteric contemplation solely defines McLaughlin’s art historical achievements.

Born outside Boston in 1898, McLaughlin was the son of a Superior Court judge, and one of seven children. Encouraged by his mother, he spent time in the city's Museum of Fine Arts, with its exceptional Asian art collection. After serving two years in the Navy during World War I and a short stint selling real estate, he and his wife, Florence — a grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson — moved to Japan in 1935, staying in Asia for three years. It was during this period that McLaughlin first became acquainted with the work of 15th century Japanese painter, Sesshu, and his use of the Ma – or Marvelous Void. He also amassed a sufficient inventory of antiquities and prints that would allow him to open a gallery, Tokaido Inc., on River Street in Boston, upon their return to the States. During World War II, he was recruited for his fluency in Japanese to do Marine Corps intelligence work in China, Burma and India. McLaughlin translated within internment camps set up in California for the Japanese-American “enemy aliens”, and helped organize the flow of intelligence to the Allied Forces from headquarters in New Delhi. For his service, McLaughlin was awarded the Bronze Star in 1945. A decorated American soldier, McLaughlin rejoined Florence in California where they built a home in the sleepy beachside settlement of Dana Point, seven miles south of Laguna Beach. McLaughlin was almost 50 years old when he started painting full time.

Almost immediately, McLaughlin arrived at what could be described as his mature style. By 1949 his canvases were organized around rectangles of varying sizes painted in thin layers and decanted hues. Circles, squares, and crosses appear in works prior to 1954, after which point McLaughlin further distilled his formal vocabulary. McLaughlin explains, “Naturally I impose certain disciplines on myself and among these are first of all the exclusive use of the rectangle in a manner that, by implication, the forms will tend to destroy themselves. Mondrian, toward the end of his life, realized that this feeling of destruction was a step forward. That is, it helped to remove the ‘object’ from the painting.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Inc., John McLaughlin: Paintings 1949-1975, September - October 1979, n.p.) The five paintings collected by Joni and Monte Gordon read like a primer on the artist’s formalist theories; rectangles so thinly sliced they recede and disappear are balanced by vast tracts more akin to desert void than geometric form. Color was only important to McLaughlin in so far as it related to form. According to McLaughin, “A particular color may impress itself in the early stages of composing a painting and often is a strong factor in determining its own as well as the dimensions and color of other forms.”

From a formal standpoint, McLaughlin’s paintings from the 50s and 60s invite immediate comparison to his modernist predecessors, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, as well as to his contemporaries working in New York, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. McLaughlin has cited Malevich’s White on White (1918) as the penultimate of non-objectivity and the key to his own painting, saying, “I feel that, conceptually, White on White was the magnificent break-through which completely eliminates the object, confronting the viewer with the most penetrating, demanding, and at the same time, simplest vehicle by which he may see himself in relation to nature on his own terms.” McLaughlin used these formal ideas pioneered by Malevich as a blue print, getting rid of the distracting programmatic utopianist element. The same can be said of Mondrian’s influence; McLaughlin’s own work echoes the Dutch artist’s mastery of the color/form relationship, but where Mondrian’s patterns imply a rhythm and are tethered to the physical world, McLaughlin developed compositions which in theory would enable contemplation free from the limitations of a particular image or ideal. The rectangular slivers in McLaughlin’s compositions can also be compared to the ‘zips’ in Barnett Newman’s monumental compositions from the same period. Whereas McLaughlin's paintings bare no trace of the artist's hand, Newman’s ‘zips’ relate to drawing and by extension, the hand and the artist’s body. Painted on a giant scale and in rhapsodic color, Newman’s paintings and those of the Abstract-Expressionist set, largely explored the content of their own emotions. Explaining his attraction to Asian painting, McLaughlin says, “These paintings I could get into and they made me wonder who I was. By contrast, Western painters tried to tell me who they were.”

Arguably, the most relevant connection to McLaughlin’s methodology would be the three years spent living in Asia, and the time devoted thereafter to studying the antiquities traded through his Boston gallery. In Japan, McLaughlin discovered the work of Toyo Sesshu, the 15^th century literati painter. He admired Sesshu’s landscapes not for their detailed lines and brushwork, but rather for the large expanses of white he left open; expanses that hinted at the existence of a mystical void at the heart of nature. (Susan C. Larsen, “John McLaughlin: A Rare Sensibility,” in Exh. Cat., Laguna Art Museum, John McLaughlin: Western Modernism Eastern Thought, 1996, p. 18) The idea of the Ma – or Marvelous Void, lent a guiding principle to McLaughlin’s formal constructions; the Ma being a spatial emptiness that provides an essential focal point between two objects or subjects. Although McLaughlin never specifically referenced the void beyond Japanese art, he would have undoubtedly noted its omnipresence throughout the countries architecture and gardens. The graceful dualities in McLaughlin’s paintings between light and dark, weight and levity, volume and void, also suggest the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang; each form within a particular composition is complementary to the others, amounting to a whole greater than its parts.

A pioneer of 20th century abstraction in American art and a trailblazer for artists of the 1960s Light and Space movement, John McLaughlin’s is a name that has yet to receive the credit due. His art – egoless, elegant, and transcendent – belongs to a void in our collective histories; gestating in the years between World War I and World War II, McLaughlin’s singular approach to his practice was born out of the wild disarray of life. His art is something of a gift to its viewers, offering a place to reflect and an unassuming angle from which to drift.

"The overall impression of a McLaughlin painting almost invariably is that of a cool serenity. Each painting represents the outcome of a process of refinement." Jules Langsner