The Brooklyn Rail

Thornton Willis was a champion of the potent expressivity of abstract painting, extending it through his long lifetime and poising it for the future.

He was a gentle soul with movie star looks, and an iron will dedicated to fathoming the meanings that have anchored visual art since the beginning of time. Early in his career he found the contemporary sources of these meanings in the vital insights and forms of the abstract expressionist and color field painters. Finding his own way, he maintained their high values, which he felt led to the deepest reach of art—where he went the furthest of all of us. He can well be seen as, in the words of Neil Jenney, “the greatest Abstract Expressionist of them all.”

I first saw his work in the seventies—his “wedge” series—and was taken with its understanding of the power of abstract form and how it carried both personal and universal meaning. In his art he was a hero who never wavered from this course despite the spinning changes of art fashion. In the successful middle of his art career he became a pro golfer for a time (he grew up in the South), furthering his independence from the narrowing careerism of the art scene. Fortunately for us, limiting his golf strokes was less satisfying than the unlimited brushstrokes of ideas and feelings on canvas.

While Thornton's dear other-half—his wife, the artist Vered Lieb—and his family, friends and admirers will always feel bereft at the loss of him, he left the world the beautiful gift of integrity and high achievement in his courageous art. The future of art is owed a thorough Thornton Willis retrospective at one of New York's major museums.