THOMAS DOWNING | UNTITLED

Ramon Osuna, Washington D.C.

Private Collection, Washington D.C.

Weschler's Auctioneers & Appraisers, Capitol Collections, Washington D.C., 14 September 2018, Lot 285

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Thomas Downing is an American artist best known for his geometric patterns and participation with the Washington Color School of the 1960s, which included artists Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis and Sam Gilliam, among others. In 1951, with the aid of the grant funding, Downing worked as a studio assistant for Fernand Léger in Paris and began developing his own painting style that derived from his studies of artists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Tobey.

Downing became involved with the Washington Color movement after relocating to Washington D.C. to serve the US Army throughout the duration of the Korean War. Never deployed, he began working in the area as a high school teacher. By the early 1960s, Downing began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif scheme that has become the most recognizable in his oeuvre. Following a series of successful solo exhibitions in the Washington, D.C. area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s travelling exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction in 1964, as well as the influential The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965. Downing’s work is included in a number of important museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, and the Phillips Collection, both of Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena.