Keith Crown

Keith Crown (1918-2010)

Keith Allan Crown Jr. studied art at the Chicago Art Institute in the 1930s and '40s.  While he was serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, some of his drawings from Pacific island battle areas ran in Yank magazine. From the late 1940s into the 1980s, he taught art at the University of Southern California, with sabbaticals and summer positions in other parts of North America and a year in England.

Through most the 1950s and ‘60s, California coastal scenes in oils, caseins and watercolors dominated his work. He painted on site, choosing visual elements to emphasize in strong shapes and color. The Pacific gave him themes of the forces of nature, as well as memories of war comrades who did not return. He was also drawn, during those decades and later, to northern New Mexico landscapes and Midwestern scenes for inspiration.

Crown’s paintings have been exhibited in more than 100 one-person shows from 1947 to 2014, at museums and galleries including the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Pasadena Museum of Art (before it became the Norton Simon Museum). His paintings are in collections of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.; the Albuquerque Museum of Art in New Mexico; the Long Beach Museum of Art in California; state capitol buildings in Santa Fe and Sacramento; and public museums in at least 10 other states or provinces.

With frequent exhibitions of his work in the decades after World War II, Keith Crown “was a key figure in bringing post-war modern art to Southern California,” authors Gordon McClelland and Jay Last state in California Watercolors, 1850-1970.  “In the early 1960s, his works became radical abstractions and were often produced using transparent watercolors."

A May 1957 review by Jules Langsner in Art News called Crown a "top-drawer West Coast painter." Langsner described Crown's work: "Abbreviated images of sea and shoreline, of desert irradiated by scorching discs of fire are presented in tilted perspective. Shapes are designated by vibrant shorthand. Energetically brushed line bursts and crackles along the picture surface."

William Wilson, art critic at the Los Angeles Times for decades, began a Nov. 16, 1969, review with a look back to Crown's work in the 1950s:  "Keith Crown painted thick optimistically colored still-lifes and landscapes that were right on the border between depicting real things and depicting pure abstraction. The old Ankrum and Paul Rivas galleries showed his paintings. You could argue about them but you couldn't say they weren't amazingly well-painted." About Crown's newest work at the time, WIlson continued, "Sixteen oil and still-life paintings find him still on that border between nature and abstraction. Some artists pick a place and settle in. They don't necessarily stagnate. Crown has moved from the muscularity of re-figured Abstract Expressionism to a brand of updated Taos mysticism. …He always attracts the relevant past and the exciting present. These works reach back to Marsden Hartley, Charles Burchfield and Georgia O'Keeffe. But, in their own way, they are as mystical and psychedelic as a light show and probably a lot more clearly connected to American tradition."

In another L.A. Times review just four months later, Wilson wrote: “Keith Crown’s art shows one of the most underplayed of mature California talents. His second solo exhibition of the season shows a growth so continuous and organic its differences are as hard to express as they are noticeable. Crown remains essentially a watercolor landscapist transported into the realm of abstract imagination experiencing itself ever more in active wet strokes that blend toward a lively plane.”

Peter Plagens, long-time art critic for Newsweek and one of hundreds of artists whom Crown taught at USC, wrote in Art Forum for February 1970 about a one-man show of watercolors. He said, "Crown bullies through the natural restrictions on intensity, and the traditional overtones of his medium and pulls off some of the best small paintings in my direct experience. His decorativeness is solid and persistent; his color is honest as well as pretty; and his drawing -- that is, carving up the page -- is pragmatically simple. His sole new ingredient, spray, falls to the paper from an airbrush charged with an over-filled spare tire, where it is blotted and washed and clashed with the rest of his transparent crust. If Crown is unpretentious to a fault, he is also a very good painter."

In Keith Crown Watercolors, by University of Arizona art historian Sheldon Reich and published in 1986 by the University of Missouri Press, the author calls Crown "one of this country's most distinguished and respected artists."

An excerpt: "Clearly Crown was searching for a way of materializing forces in nature that lie beyond visual perception. In a sketchbook from 1956, the artist jotted down these thoughts: 'I'm trying to bridge the gap between symbol and reality -- to knit together the character of each painting -- to invent personal, poetic symbols that express visually the sound, taste, smell, movement, as well as appearance. A symbol is generally universal -- mine I wish to be more specific.'

"We are concerned now with the artist's relationship to his subjects, a relationship that remains essential to Crown today. That relationship is always a miraculous, constantly changing balance of what is seen, felt, and known. He has been consistently abstract throughout his career but has never stepped beyond into the realm of the nonobjective. As usual, Crown explains it best: 'I see something and I get to looking at it and I try to figure out how I can bring out that thing which I see -- exaggerate it or characterize it -- more than it is. I like to take extreme measures to do that, something I think the viewer hasn't seen before. But I want to try to keep my feet in reality -- an anchor -- and try to make people look at the painting, and while they might be puzzled by it, they are attracted to it because they notice an element of recognition.  They feel like they've been here before. They know what this is in spite of the fact that it's odd or unconventional.'"

Ray Kass, artist, writer and founder of the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia, wrote a forward to Reich's book, including these two excerpts:

"Like the work of his predecessors, Winslow Homer and John Marin, Keith Crown's watercolors, in particular, represent a personally insightful experience of the natural world, a world that he has described in the visual terms of a unique, mature style that is his own successful idiom. Also, I believe that he has achieved an exemplary fulfillment of one of modernism's implicit promises: the potential of an individual to work adjacent to but outside the mainstream in order to invent an authentic sense of self that is based in art and from which art may proceed."

"Keith has always been interested in exploring the inherent nature of watercolor paint, inventing ways to use the paint for its own beautiful effect. The intrinsic qualities of water media so readily lend themselves to envisioning the changing masks of nature that it is not uncommon for an admiring spectator of Crown's paintings to sense the weight of the world in a small, pigment-soaked patch of paper."

Submitted by: BENTON GALLERY