Fuller Potter
Mixed media collage (including cut paper, marbles, ceramic tiles, twigs)
14 x 17 x 4.25 inches
1960
$3,500
Mixed media collage (including cut paper, marbles, ceramic tiles, twigs)
14 x 17 x 4.25 inches
1960
$3,500
Mixed media collage (including cut paper, marbles, ceramic tiles, twigs)
14 x 17 x 4.25 inches
1960
$3,500
Mixed media collage (including cut paper, marbles, ceramic tiles, twigs)
14 x 17 x 4.25 inches
1960
$3,500
Mixed media collage (including cut paper, marbles, ceramic tiles, twigs)
14 x 17 x 4.25 inches
1960
$3,500
Bio Synopsis
In 1929, at nineteen, Fuller Potter studied in Paris at the Académie Julian, the École des Beaux-Arts, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with André Lhôte. He then studied in New York at the Art Students League with Walt Kuhn, who in 1932 was instrumental in getting him an exhibition at the Marie Harriman Gallery. The next year, a trip deep into the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee impressed him so much that he set up a studio and stayed there for the next ten years, throughout the Great Depression. He returned to New York in 1940, exhibiting immediately. By 1945 he was painting large AbEx canvases and was represented by the avant-garde Ferargil Gallery. An ArtNews critic reviewing his solo at Ferargil in 1949 noted “the weight of his expressive technique and the range of his rich, rusty colors.” Potter would have been inducted to the pantheon of famous AbEx painters had it not been for his emotional collision with Jackson Pollock, also an alcoholic. That catalyst compelled Potter to join Alcoholics Anonymous and move far from the city with his family to a forty-acre farm in Connecticut, where he built a studio. From that point onward, he became a reclusive but incessantly active painter, musician, and writer, and filled notebooks every day with his philosophical writings. In 1958, the Stuttman Gallery persuaded him to return for a solo show, and he received positive reviews in The New York Times. However, the commercial art world had little interest for one who ultimately chose to remain among the most private of painters. Whereas Pollock was interested in the unconscious, Potter became obsessed with in the unseen energies of the universe. A prolific writer who also illustrated how his pursuit of painting and music had become a spiritual quest, he was bursting with creative energy until his death in 1990, at age eighty.
Artist’s Statement
“It was the summer of 1948 when I introduced Fuller to Jackson Pollock. Fuller had been developing his own style of abstract expressionism for several years, so I thought it would be interesting for him to come over to our place for dinner with Jackson. Considering Jackson’s difficult personality, I was surprised that they hit it off so well and that Jackson invited Fuller to see his paintings in his barn. Pollock rarely made such invitations. Well, they hit it off too well. Fuller returned to our home at four o’clock the next morning, drunk and exhausted. Later, he said that while he was exhilarated by Jackson’s paintings, he was terrified because he had also confronted his demons. That was the incident that made Fuller join A.A.” — Jeffrey Potter, brother of Fuller Potter and author of To an Early Grave, the first biography on Jackson Pollock.
“Were I to have more faith in and familiarity with the Eternal Muses, might I not find that there is an intergalactic aesthetic reality to be espoused? Not the latest artist arrival on the current of popularity & esteem, but the spaceman of all time. Great comfort would be in belonging to the vast company of an interstellar artists’ mind world.” — Fuller Potter, 1958
– Peter Hastings Falk
Read the full backstory about Potter here.