Myron Stout

Myron Stout (b. 1908, Denton, Texas; d. 1987, Chatham, Massachusetts) paintings reflect the aesthetics of hard-edged abstraction with a focus on the process. His work exists beyond the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism and other prevailing art movements of his time.

After completing military service during World War II, Stout focused on his career as an artist. Passionate about art since his youth in Texas, in the late 1940s Stout began attending painting and drawing classes at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts in New York. Stout’s early works were influenced by European geometric painting, creating complex, multi-hued abstractions. In 1952, Stout relocated to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and began working on a series of paintings rendered in rich blacks, lunar whites, and silvery grays. Throughout his early career, drawing remained the basis of his practice. He devoted the rest of his career to black-and-white abstraction, working meticulously on intimately scaled works that harnessed the sensibilities of Abstract Expressionism while anticipating the development of Minimalism. The change in direction was inspired in part by his reading of Greek tragedies, particularly Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom he had not re-visited since college.

Stouts work exists at the crossroads of contradictions: black and white, night and day, darkness and light, fullness and void, the symbolic and concrete. As characterized by B.H. Friedman, Stout made his paintings “so physical, so full of grain and texture of life that they suggest metaphysical photographs taken somehow simultaneously at the dazzling speed of light and at the slow, grinding pace of eternity.” In a time when speed and production were becoming increasingly prominent in the art world, Stout had a slow, agonizing practice that often meant working on individual drawings and paintings for decades

Due to the nature of his working process, Stout produced a small body of work and only participated in a handful of exhibitions during his career. In 1954, his first solo exhibition opened at Stable Gallery. Three years later his second came to Hansa Gallery, an artist cooperative begun by Hofmann students. Twenty years then passed before his third solo exhibition, a retrospective, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, cementing his place in the canon of abstract art. Since his death, Stout has been heralded as “the secret hero of the new abstraction.” Stout was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. His work is currently held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, Myron Stout: Charcoal Drawings, January 16–March 1, 2025.

Craig Starr Gallery, New York, Myron Stout and Cycladic Art, October 5, 2021–January 15, 2022.

Washburn Gallery, New York, Myron Stout: Landscape Drawings, March 8–April 14, 2018.         

Craig Starr Gallery, New York, Myron Stout, November, 4, 2016–January 21, 2017.

Washburn Gallery, New York, Myron Stout: Paintings and Drawings, April 26–June 29, 2007.

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Selected Group Exhibitions 

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Saint Louis, Dialogues & Conversations, March 6–August 9, 2026.

Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, Robert Moskowitz, Myron Stout, July 1–August 7, 2026.

Art Institute of Chicago, Contemporary Drawings from the Stenn Family Collection, June 28–September 15, 2025.

Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston, Rubber Stamp Portfolio, June 21–July 18, 2025.

TOTAH, New York, This Must Be the Place, June 19–August 16, 2024.

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Selected Publications

Dickey, Tina. Myron Stout and Cycladic Art. New York: Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2021.

Anfam, David. Myron Stout. New York: Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2016.

Berry, Ian, and Jack Shear. Twice Drawn: Modern and Contemporary Drawings in Context. Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2011.

Selections from the Journals of Myron Stout. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2005.

Gooding, Mel. Myron Stout. Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 1998.

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