John Opper

John Opper (1908–1994) was an American painter who transitioned from semi-abstract paintings in the late 1930s to fully abstract ones in the 1950s. He became known for his handling of color and in particular his ability to create dramatic intensity on the picture plane by means of juxtaposed, more-or-less rectangular areas of color. He was associated with the abstract expressionist movement and frequently showed in galleries that specialized in abstract expressionist art. Late in life, he described his style by what it was not. He said, "The whole is the sum of its parts. That's what my school of abstract art is about, a school that evolved from nature, not conceptual, not geometric, not hard-edged. It's only art."[1]

John Opper
Born
John Samuel Opper

(1908-10-29)October 29, 1908
Chicago, Illinois
DiedOctober 4, 1994(1994-10-04) (aged 85)
New York City, New York
Resting placeGreen River Cemetery
NationalityU. S. citizen

Early life and training

Opper was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He became interested in drawing at a young age. While in high school he took art classes and enrolled in a correspondence art course. In his senior year he attended classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Graduating about 1926 he briefly studied at the Cleveland School of Art and there encountered the artists Henry Keller, as an instructor, and Clarence Carter, as a fellow student. He spent the following year in Chicago taking classes at the Art Institute and subsequently returned to Cleveland where he enrolled at Western Reserve University, graduating in 1932. Two years later he spent a summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts.[2][note 1] There, he met Hans Hofmann, who was teaching at the Thurn School of Art. Hofmann influenced his approach to art, although not as an instructor.[2][note 2] In 1934 Opper moved to Manhattan and a year later began to work in the studio that Hofmann had set up as the School of Fine Arts on East 57th Street.[note 3] There he met modernist painters who sought Hofmann's guidance and began to develop his own modernist style.[note 4]

Career in art

In 1936 Opper became a founding member of American Abstract Artists, a group formed by New York artists to promote and exhibit a style of art that was then derided by critics and shunned by collectors.[6] In 1937 the influential critic, Edward Alden Jewell, called this effort a "revolt against literary subject-paintings" and said that the great majority of paintings in a current exhibition were simply "objects."[9] The same year, after a brief attempt to support himself as an art instructor, Opper joined the Federal Art Project in Manhattan as an easel artist and remained for three years. He later said that the project was a lifesaver for impoverished artists, particularly abstract artists such as himself.[2] At the same time, he joined the Artists Union and became business manager of its journal, Art Front.[2][note 5] Within the year, Opper left the Artists Union and joined the American Artists' Congress.[note 6] He grew disenchanted with this organization, in turn, and left it after submitting work to two of its group exhibitions. By his account, during these two years his work was both semi-abstract and anti-war.[2]

Opper was given his first solo exhibition at the Artists Gallery in 1937.[13][note 7] The water colors and temperas he showed drew favorable comment from Howard Devree, critic for the New York Times, who said his realist and semi-abstract landscapes were vigorous, germane, and expressive and from Jerome Klein of the New York Post, who commended Opper's "sparkling brilliance and unfailing vivacity."[note 8] Before leaving the Artists' Congress he helped organize its fourth annual exhibition in 1940.[16] Entitled "Art in a Democracy," the show featured artists across the country who worked in the Federal Art Project. Writing in the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell said it was "cluttered with shrillness and posturing and ineptitude," but A. Z. Kruse of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that he was overwhelmed by its overall high quality, saying "there are too many noteworthy contributions to permit of enumeration and evaluation."[note 9] The Congress was then torn by dissension and on its last legs. Opper had come to the conclusion that he could not create art as a means of correcting society's ills.[12] He later said, "I was torn between the needs of the society and the needs of the war on one hand, and on the other hand what I felt were aesthetic needs of painting. So finally the only solution that I was able to make for myself was to begin to separate the two. I was quite active socially, as much as I could be. And as far as my paintings were concerned I began to abstract from nature and work very abstractly."[2]

He took on war-related work between 1942 and 1945 and produced less art than he had in the 1930s. Nonetheless, he contributed to group exhibitions during this time and in 1942 was given another well-received solo exhibition at the Artists Gallery.[19] Although he spent most of the post-war period in teaching positions outside New York, he was able both to continue painting and to show the works he made. In 1947, the curator of modern painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, Katharine Kuh, took one of his paintings for a show called "Abstract and Surrealist American Art." Presenting a cross-section of modernist American painting and sculpture, the exhibition uncovered an abstractionist movement that was then beginning to gain momentum, particularly in New York.[2][20][note 10] In 1953 Opper participated in a group show held at a New York commercial gallery and in 1955 he was the last of a series of abstract expressionist artists to be given solo exhibitions at the Egan Gallery.[21][22][note 11] In reviewing the show, a critic said Opper's painting "exemplified with gusto the leading contemporary abstract trends in its brushfuls of richly stirred color applied in shaggy strokes and sharp accents."[22]

From the beginning of the 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, Opper showed frequently in solo exhibitions and in group shows. In 1961 and 1962 he was given solo exhibitions at the Stable Gallery, leading one critic to note "abstract seas of luminous color" in his paintings and another to lament the inadequacy of language to convey the paintings' visual impact.[24][25][26][note 12] In 1966 Opper began an association with the Grace Borgenicht Gallery which lasted into the 1990s.[note 13] Many of his appearances in that gallery were solo exhibitions that were reviewed by critics of the New York Times (1966, Grace Glueck;[30] 1968 and 1971, John Canaday;[31][32] and 1973, 1974 and 1979 Hilton Kramer[33][34][35]). In 1978 the Montclair Art Museum paired Opper's paintings with those of another abstract expressionist, James Brooks, in a show that a Times critic called "outstanding."[36] In 1989, 1990, and 1997 his work appeared in retrospective exhibitions at the Cleveland Institute of Art and in galleries in Sarasota, Florida, and East Hampton, Long Island.[37][1][38]

Artistic style and critical reception

During the 1930s and 1940s Opper painted mainly on paper in water-colors and gouache. He also used oil on canvas and made some lithographic prints. During the 1950s oils predominate and thereafter acrylics on canvas or paper. His works are mostly easel-size or, if larger, small enough to be painted from a stationary position. As one critic said, "Like de Kooning, Opper preferred to work within his arm's reach."[39]

His early training gave him excellent technical facility. An able draftsman, he could create realistic depictions of natural subjects, particularly still lifes. However, he did not enjoy the work and, after seeing semi-abstract and abstract works by European artists and after meeting with American artists who were experimenting along these lines, he expanded his range and began to make semi-abstractions.[1] In a 1968 oral history interview he said paintings by Paul Cézanne and Milton Avery impressed him, but he found greatest influence in work by Henri Matisse and John Marin.[2][13] Following Marin, he began to make works on paper, particularly seascapes and landscapes.[13][15] His response to Matisse was more complicated. In a 1990 interview he said, "Here were these marvelous paintings, so simple a child could do them. What an amazing thing that is! Simplicity is the hardest thing in the world to do. All you leave is the guts. You take everything else out."[1]

During the time he worked in the Federal Art Project, he tried his hand at social realism, taking a lead from artists such as José Clemente Orozco, but, as noted above, after a year or so came to believe that making art and acting to correct societal injustice were two separate matters.[2]

John Opper, Untitled, oil on canvas, 1935, 24 x 18 inches. Smithsonian Art Museum
John Opper, Untitled, mixed media on paper mounted on board, 1950, 25 1/2 x 20 inches

Among the artists he met in the Artists Union there were several who shared Opper's doubts concerning social realism. Balcomb Greene, who, in 1936 became the first chairman of American Abstract Artists, provided one such influence in the direction of abstractionism.[40] As Opper put it, "he was one of the first to argue that there is probably something in art besides the image that you show."[2] Another motivation for his transition to abstractionism came from his feeling for color. During the time that his work was still representational, the reviews he received in New York newspapers noted his facility in handling color.[note 14] He later explained that some of his motivation for abandoning representation came partly from his feeling for color. In 1968 he said, "the more I became aware of color and design the more I came in conflict with the object that I was painting. So it soon became a problem either I let the color go — and keep the composition as it should be, naturalistically or representationally — or I should take freedom with color and design."[2]

As he began to work in an abstractionist style Opper began to see a division between artists who took a more rational, carefully planned approach to their work and ones whose work was more intuitive. As he saw it, on the one side were the geometric abstractionists who tended to show the influence of Picasso and who made neat and clean, clearly defined art, and on the other side were those who tended to show the influence of Matisse and who made art in a freer, looser style, showing greater warmth.[2]

At the end of the 1930s Opper was making a transition from representational to semi-abstract paintings. His transition from semi- to pure abstraction was slowed during three years that he spent making technical drawings for a marine architectural firm during the Second World War.[5] Nonetheless, he continued to exhibit during these years and was becoming known for his oils in addition to the water colors.[19][42]

John Opper, YRG 20, acrylic on canvas, c. 1970, 28 x 28 inches

When Opper took a teaching job in North Carolina following the war, he was able to spend more time painting and his style shifted from semi-abstract to fully abstract. In the 1960s, looking back on this period, he said, his painting had "more abstract expressionism in it than anything."[2] At the end of the 1940s, a move to Wyoming for another teaching position, led him to work, he later said, in "a kind of abstract style from nature." He went on to explain, "You could only recognize it as from nature in the sense that there was a form that was maybe a mountain, a big shape."[2] During a subsequent move to another teaching position, this time in Alabama, he later said he was working in highly simplified forms that he saw as "close to Matisse in quality."[2]

He was of two minds about these extended periods of time he spent away from the emerging abstract expressionist art scene in Manhattan. He missed the productive ambiance that he experienced when he mixed socially with other experimental artists, but on the other hand he was uncomfortable with the competition for recognition in that environment.[2] He later reported that he "wasn't a natural self-promoter. And I thought I'd be sore as hell to be on that scene."[37]

John Opper, Untitled, acrylic on Arches France paper, 1976, 30 3/8 × 22 3/8 inches. Estate of John Opper
John Opper, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 1981, 44 x 44 inches

As his work became more abstract, he changed his palette. Where before he had used colors that appear in nature, he began to juxtapose bright, intense colors against one another. In the early 1970s a critic noted that the focus of Opper's paintings was "the optical pleasure of pure color."[32] Where his earlier abstractions had conveyed a sense of space, his paintings from the early 1950s onward used areas of color to effect a two-dimensional means of creating dramatic intensity on the picture plane.[2] Of this approach to his work Opper said: "I was trying to paint a painting where you would not be aware of the painterliness, you would not be aware of the unusual – anything about that painting except the painting. And this is I think the absence of anything that had a flair or that showed a certain kind of competency of technique."[2] One critic referred to Opper's use of "peninsular shapes that reach out into abstract seas of luminous color."[24]

In 1978 David L. Shirley, writing in the New York Times, called attention to the rigor and visual control evident in Opper's work and said "he distilled his visual vocabulary to the simplest common denominator, with forms carefully locked into a tight relationship with one another."[36] Ten years earlier, in an oral history session with Irving Sandler, Opper commented on the effort that underlay this rigor and control. He said ""I think after all any mature painter — and I hope I am one — doesn’t show the agonies that he goes through any more than you do in your writing. But, you know, it doesn’t come easy. But it has to look as though it came easy."[2] This is not to say that Opper made careful plans before beginning a painting. He did not start even with an idea, but rather made a beginning and responded to his instincts about the painting as it progressed. In 1990 he said: "I start and as it changes, I change. As it demands, I try to fulfill it. If you're very sensitive to what you're doing, if one area doesn't work, it's because some other area doesn't work. The whole is the sum of its parts. That's what my school of abstract art is about, a school that evolved from nature, not conceptual, not geometric, not hard-edged. It's only art."[1]

Career in teaching

At age 24, when his studies at Western Reserve were coming to an end, Opper got a job as a part-time art instructor at Karamu House, a Cleveland settlement house school.[2] Having moved to Manhattan he obtained a similar job at a school for delinquents.[43] At the close of World War II he spent a year teaching at the University of North Carolina Woman's College in Greensboro (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro).[2] Between 1945 and 1947 he taught at the University of Wyoming; and between 1947 and 1949 at the University of Alabama.[2]

From 1949 to 1952 he taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, while he studied for a doctor of education degree at the university.[37] Concurrently, he taught evening classes at Pratt Institute.[2] In the summer of 1952 he returned to North Carolina as an artist-in-residence at the Burnsville School of Fine Arts, a college campus of the Woman's College UNC, located in the mountains. That fall he moved back to Woman's College UNC in Greensboro as an associate professor.[2][44] From 1957 until he retired in 1974, he was a professor of art at New York University.[10][37][45]

Notable students of Opper included painter Lee Hall.[46]

Personal life and family

Opper's birth name was John Samuel Opper.[47] He was born on October 29, 1908, in Chicago, Illinois, to Joseph (or Joe) Opper (1885-1947) and his wife Mary Milstein Opper (1887-1968).[48] Both parents were born in Kiev, Ukraine. Opper had one brother, Leon Jay Opper (1918-1992) and three sisters, Ann Opper Waldman (1906-1997), Carrie Opper Cohen (1910-1967), and Sylvia Opper Brandt (1916-1999).[49] In 1934 Opper married Estelle Rita Hausman in Manhattan.[47] They remained married until their deaths 60 years later. She had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1910, and like him, died in 1994.[50] They had one daughter, Jane Opper, and one son, Joseph Opper.[51]

Between 1941 and 1945 Opper worked for a marine architectural company making pipe system drawings of PT boats.[2]

After retiring from NYU in 1974 Opper spent summers in Amagansett, Long Island, and the colder months in Greenwich Village.[50] Beginning in 1989 he spent most of the year in Sarasota, Florida, while continuing to spend summers on Long Island.[1]

Opper died in New York City on October 4, 1994, and is buried in East Hampton's Green River Cemetery.[52][53][54]

Public museum collections

Notes
  1. In about 1930 modernist artist, Ernest Thurn, established a summer art school in Gloucester. In 1933 Thurn invited Hans Hofmann to teach for a session. Returning again the next summer, Hofmann taught in the session which Opper attended. Later that year he set up his own school in Manhattan.[3][4]
  2. In a casual meeting, Hofmann said he had a good sense of color and should try to paint in a less academic style.[2]
  3. "year later,"[2]"1934,"[5] "School[3]
  4. The other painters he met at Hofmann's school included including Byron Browne, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, George McNeil, Mercedes Carles, Giorgio Cavallon, and Wilfrid Zogbaum.[2]
  5. The Artists Union was an offshoot of the New York John Reed Club. It arose as a Depression-era effort by city artists to obtain government funded work the great number of them who were unemployed. The Federal Art Project itself and its unusually generous wages and working conditions resulted largely from this effort. The union was radical in its social views and combative in its methods.Art Front was the public face of its radicalism and pugnacity.[10]
  6. The American Artists' Congress was a nation-wide organization to help artists cope with the effects of the Great Depression and to show common cause with other organizations in opposition to fascism and threat of war. Like the Artists Union it was an offshoot of the John Reed Clubs. However it was more moderate than the union both in its objectives and its actions. Membership was limited to "artists of standing" as determined by the executive committee. It held group exhibitions in New York and other major cities. Unwillingly tangled in international politics, particularly with respect to the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939, the group lost its impetus and gradually declined.[11][12]
  7. Founded by Hugh S. Stix in 1936 and run by Frederica Beer, the Artists Gallery was supported by donations and charged no fees on artists' sales.[14]
  8. "Devree,"[13] "Klein"[15]
  9. "Times,"[17] "Eagle"[18]
  10. In putting together the show, Kuh and co-curator Frederick S. Sweet spent months crisscrossing the country to select works that fairly represented the maturity toward which the abstractionist movement was then striving. On one of her trips she traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, where Opper was teaching, in order to examine and select a painting of his for the exhibition.[2][20]
  11. Charles Egan operated his gallery for a decade following the close of World War II. He gave Willem de Kooning his first solo exhibition in 1948 and, over the years, showed many of the abstract expressionist artists of the time.[23]
  12. The Stable Gallery opened in a former stable in Manhattan in 1953. It became known for a series of controversial exhibitions, called "Stable Annuals," in which the work of contemporary American artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Indiana, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg. Its owner, Eleanor Ward, closed the gallery in 1970 out of dissatisfaction with the commercialism of the Manhattan art scene.[27]
  13. The Borgenicht Gallery opened in Manhattan in 1951 aiming to exhibit works by contemporary artists. At first it represented American painters such as Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Leonard Baskin and Ilya Bolotowsky, and later added artists from outside the U.S. including José de Rivera and Jean Arp. Its owner was artist, Grace Borgenicht Brandt (1915-2001). The gallery closed in 1995.[28][29]
  14. See for example, Edward Alden Jewel in the Times,[7] Jerome Klein in the Post,[15] Howard Devree in the Times,[19] and an anonymous critic in the Post[41]

References
  1. Mary Ann Marger (1990-05-07). "Thinking in the Abstract Series". St. Petersburg Times. St. Petersburg, Florida. p. 1D. Here I am 81 years old, and I'm just as excited about painting as I was when I was 17. I'm painting differently than I was then, and I think I'm painting better, and that's what's exciting.
  2. "Oral history interview with John Opper, 1968 Sept. 9-1969 Jan 3". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  3. "Biographical Chronology, 1930–1939". Hans Hofmann. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  4. Judson, Alice (June 1930). "The Gloucester Art Colony". American Magazine of Art. 21 (6): 342–343. JSTOR 23931751.
  5. Virginia M. Mecklenburg (1989). The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction, 1930-1945. Washington, D.C., National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press. pp. 139–142. ISBN 9780874747171.
  6. Susan C. Larsen (1974). "The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History 1936-1941". Archives of American Art Journal. 14 (1): 2–7. doi:10.1086/aaa.14.1.1556919. JSTOR 1556919. S2CID 192090870.
  7. Edward Alden Jewell (1937-04-06). "Abstract Artists Open Show Today: They Arrange 'Demonstration of Revolt Against Literary Subject--Paintings' All Exhibitors American; Gertrude Greene, Charles Shaw and George Morris Among 39 Represented; Announced as a Revolt". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 21. The first large and comprehensive demonstration of the contemporary American revolt against literary subject-paintings that have come to dominate the official and governmental art-revivals.
  8. "Edward Alden Jewell". New York Times. New York, New York. 1947-10-19. p. X9.
  9. "objects,"[7] "influential"[8]
  10. Gerald M. Monroe (Autumn 1972). "The Artists Union of New York". Art Education. 32 (1): 17–20. doi:10.2307/775601. JSTOR 775601.
  11. "American Artists' Congress". American Magazine of Art. 29 (3): 192–194. Mar 1936. JSTOR 23951890.
  12. Gerald M. Monroe (1975). "The American Artists Congress and the Invasion of Finland". Archives of American Art Journal. 15 (1): 14–20. doi:10.1086/aaa.15.1.1557148. JSTOR 1557148. S2CID 192924688.
  13. Howard Devree (1937-10-10). "A Reviewer's Notebook: Brief Comment on Some of the Recently Opened Exhibitions in the Galleries". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 182. Debut — Water-colors and temperas by John Opper comprise the first show of the season at the Artists' Gallery.
  14. "Artists Gallery". New York Times. New York, New York. 1940-04-28. p. 126.
  15. Jerome Klein (1937-11-09). "The Critic Takes a Glance Around the Galleries". New York Post. New York, New York. p. 11. In his first New York one-man show at the Artists' Gallery, John Opper establishes himself as a water colorist of sparkling brilliance and unfailing vivacity. At this stage of the game Mr. Opper is most concerned with bring out flashing harmonies with a freely moving brush. If forms and colors fairly jostle one another in their excitement, rather than settle into deep-knit structure, that is all to the good, for Mr. Opper is a young artist. And in some works, notably "Old Garage" and "Road to Staten Island," there is evidence that he is going more deeply into the matter.
  16. "WPA Artists in Exhibit of Art Congress". Daily Worker. New York, New York. 1940-04-18. p. 7.
  17. Edward Alden Jewell (1940-04-06). "Artists Congress Holds Exhibition". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 19.
  18. A. Z. Kruse (1940-04-14). "Art in a Democracy". Brooklyn Eagle. Brooklyn, New York. p. 6.
  19. Howard Devree (1953-06-07). "Diverse Moderns: Stress on Expressionist and Abstract Approaches in the New Shows". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X8. John Opper in his water-colors at the Artists' Gallery makes a heart-warming report of progress. Here and there is homage to Marin, but Opper is definitely finding himself. He is not afraid of color or of dashing composition, and most of these papers are decidedly convincing.
  20. Susan F. Rossen; Charlotte Moser (1990). "Primer for Seeing: The Gallery of Art Interpretation and Katharine Kuh's Crusade for Modernism in Chicago". Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies. 16 (1): 20–21. doi:10.2307/4101566. JSTOR 4101566.
  21. Howard Devree (1953-06-07). "Diverse Moderns: Stress on Expressionist and Abstract Approaches in the New Shows". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X8.
  22. Stuart Preston (1955-09-25). "Variety in Early Shows". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X10. John Opper's show of paintings at the Egan Gallery ... is his first in fifteen years. It could have little relationship with the past for it exemplifies with gusto the leading contemporary abstract trends in its brushfuls of richly stirred color applied in shaggy strokes and sharp accents.
  23. Bruce Lambert (1993-03-18). "Charles Egan, 81; Art Gallery Owner Helped de Kooning". New York Times. New York, New York. p. B10.
  24. Dore Ashton (1960-02-11). "Art: Saucy Impastoes: Paintings of Yektai at the Poindexter — Sarai Sherman, Opper Have Shows". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 32. John Opper at the Stable Gallery ... shows simple schematic oils that in their deep-dyed colors have a certain melancholy depth. Mr. Opper usually uses peninsular shapes that reach out into abstract seas of luminous color. He keeps the edges ambiguous, so that the boundaries between what appears concrete and what appears fluid are never fixed. In the most sensitive of his abstractions, Mr. Opper uses thin veils of color giving his paintings an interior glow.
  25. Stuart Preston (1961-03-19). "Visual Grasps: The Art of Sweden's Evert Lundquist -- Battle of Styles on the Home Front". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X19. The delicate adjustments of color in John Opper's hyper-refined non-objective paintings at the Stable Gallery are so exclusively addressed to the eye that any verbal attempt to describe them can only, by comparison, be gross and inexact. If this artist has been influenced by anything exterior to the mind's eye that might be the appearance of the sun's spectrum during total eclipse.
  26. Stuart Preston (1962-03-11). "Art: Variety Is the Spice of 10 Shows: Thomas Sears Young Exhibits Sculpture Painter's Transition Figures by Tony Vevers". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 22. If color by itself, and not as an ornament or a coating for form, is sought, that quest should be satisfied at the exhibition of John Opper's paintings at the Stable Gallery, .. They swim in chromatic seas most beguiling to the eye.
  27. Grace Glueck (1984-01-07). "Eleanor Ward Is Dead At 72; Dealer for New U.S. Artists". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 10.
  28. "Finding Aid to the Grace Borgenicht Gallery Records, circa 1953-1996" (PDF). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
  29. Roberta Smith (2001-07-21). "Grace Borgenicht Brandt, 86, New York Art Dealer, Dies". New York Times. New York, New York. p. A13.
  30. Grace Glueck (1966-12-10). "Art: 32 Robert Jacobsen Sculptures Shown Here". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 33. The rough slats and blocks of color that fill Mr. Opper's big canvases often enough add up to a strikingly decorative painting, as in "November, 1966," done in a beautiful range of reds and tan. He has also produced a group of small collages, made of painted strips of paper on painted grounds. But often their scale works to their disadvantage.
  31. John Canaday (1968-10-12). "Art: A Very Good Month: 'Ritual Vessels of Bronze Age China' Joins List of Fine Shows in Town". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 31. As a color outfielder, Mr. Opper is related to the more lenient branch of the family in which fluid improvisations and interplay of textures as well as of color are not yet rejected as old-fashioned concessions to the art of painting. He works with wide, vertical, irregular bands of pigment held within the area of the canvas as self-contained compositions, occasionally brought into balance by the introduction of a perfectly weighted spot of color unexpectedly, but most inconspicuously, placed.
  32. John Canaday (1971-04-10). "Art: Vivin Evokes the Paris That Was". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 19. Mr. Opper paints irregular, more or less rectangular, slabs of color shouldering one another at uneven angles. It sounds monotonous enough and, like other personal formulas in color-field painting, desperately limited. Yet, within these boundaries Mr. Opper discovers a range of variety and balance in the play of one color against others that make his show a stimulating visual experience.
  33. Hilton Kramer (1973-01-13). "Art: Walkowitz Work Shows New Aspects". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 27. The focus of these abstract paintings is on the optical pleasure of pure color. The forms are rather simple—large, irregular rectangles with soft feathery edges, or segments of rectangles—and the space they occupy is a shallow, luminous space that allow each area of color to speak for itself. The interest of such painting, beyond its immediate optical pleasure, lies in the subtle ways in which each are of color affects the whole design. Without making any large demands on the mind of the viewer, the show nonetheless brings us the kind of work that only an experienced painter could bring off with such assurance.
  34. Hilton Kramer (1974-01-26). "Art: The Klee Gift for Complexity". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 27. In an exhibition of abstract paintings in which large, irregular blocks of vivid color "float" in a space confined by an internal boundary, it is the larger works that make the most emphatic impression. Reduced to the dimensions of the ordinary easel painting, these pictures tend to shrink into their least interesting decorative components. As they move toward a mural-size scale, they acquire another kind of interest. Their blunt, elementary color forms take on an almost sculptural presence, and the passage from one panel to another—in the large "Quartet," especially—suggests that there is something more at work here than as easy taste for beautiful effects.
  35. Hilton Kramer (1979-11-02). "Greece and France Join Met in Show Of Aegean Art: Aegean Art In Show At the Met". New York Times. New York, New York. p. C1. Some painters get better as they get older, and John Opper is one of them. The formal ideas employed in his new color abstractions are anything but complicated. A half-dozen irregular vertical forms, say, are placed against a pinkish-ocher "field." What could be simpler? But each of these vertical elements is painted with a startling richness of effect, and the play of each against the others is handled with the elegance and panache of a master juggler.
  36. David L. Shirley (1978-12-17). "Art: An Appealing Style". New York Times. New York, New York. p. NJ32. Mr. Opper, on the other hand, is an expressionist whose works are completely predicated on visual control. He carefully structures and balances to achieve a rigorous composition, and he has distilled his visual vocabulary to the simplest common denominator, with forms carefully locked into a tight relationship with one another. The paintings are suffused with a calm, contemplative aspect that appeals strongly to the mind.
  37. Barbara Delatiner (1989-09-17). "An Abstract Pioneer Gains Recognition: John Opper's large canvases have 'an interplay of controlled colors.'". New York Times. New York, New York. p. LI19.
  38. Phyllis Braff (1997-06-15). "Intuitive and Sensuous Photography". New York Times. New York, New York. p. 12. A sizable group of acrylic studies on paper is closest to his best known work, characterized primarily by vertical units that can best be described as hovering somewhere between broad, mottled paint strokes and specific shapes. The studies gain their sense of dynamics from the nudging and jostling of neighboring color units that push at indefinite boundaries. More action comes from the interplay of tones and the resulting perceptual vibrations, and still more from occasional suggestions of shifting planes.
  39. Peter Malone (2016-03-09). "The Visual Music of a New York School Painter's Late Works". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2019-05-04.
  40. "Balcomb Greene". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  41. "Attractions in the Galleries". New York Sun. New York, New York. 1937-04-10. p. 18.
  42. Edward Alden Jewell (1943-01-31). "Ave, Vale: Whitney Memorial — Other Shows". New York Times. New York, New York. p. X7.
  43. "Cedar Knolls School for Girls". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
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  46. Grimes, William (2017-05-17). "Lee Hall, Artist and de Kooning Biographer, Dies at 82". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-04-04.
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