Ralph Humphrey

Ralph Humphrey was an American abstract painter whose work has been linked to both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. He was active in the New York art scene in the 1960s and '70s. His paintings are best summarized as an exploration of space through color and structure. He lived and worked in New York, NY.

He is not to be confused with the percussionist Ralph Humphrey, best known for being the drummer of The Mothers of Invention from 1973 until 1974.

Ralph Humphrey studied at Youngstown State University. He moved to New York in 1957 and immediately became a part of the art scene that was known, at the time, for Abstract Expressionism. He met artists such as Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Frank Stella, Robert Ryman, and Ellsworth Kelly, who would end up having a large influence on his work. Humphrey was a prominent member of the generation of artists who laid the groundwork for American art in the 1970s and 60s. From 1966 until his death in 1990, he taught painting in the graduate department at Hunter College.

Humphrey's artistic style went through several phases and developments, which can be roughly outlined in the following way: monochromes from 1957 to 1960; frame paintings 1961-65; shaped canvases 1967-70; constructed paintings 1971-1990. Throughout these phases, Humphrey kept a keen eye on color, light, and space while he moved between abstraction and representation. As Kenneth Baker explains in Art in America in 1984, "Each of his works defines an ideal viewing distance that can be discovered only by patient observation of the focus of the details, the resolution of the image and the proper relationship between body and object. Finding the apt distance from which to contemplate Humphrey's new paints is thus not something you do discursively: it is an exercise in feeling your way silently towards a correct spatial interval."

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023