Thornton Willis (1936–2025)

Thornton Willis (1936–2025)

Abstract painterThornton Willis, a third-wave member of the New York School acclaimed for canvases in which geometric shapes evinced a warmth atypical of such forms, died in New York on June 15. He was eighty-nine. His death was announced by his daughter Rachel Willis in a social media post. Carrying such brief, accurate titles as “Slats,” “Wedges,” “Zig-Zags,” “Triangles,” “Prismatics,” “Lattices,” “Cityscapes,” and “Steps,” Willis’s series embodied a raw mode of facture, the evidence of the artist’s hand—visible brushstrokes, imperfect lines—lending them a unique intimacy. “The paintings may not resemble human likenesses,” wrote art historian Joseph Masheck, “but they nevertheless seem somehow to proffer human character in the abstract.”

“I’m not interested in painting pictures of things. I don’t think of my paintings as pictures—I think of them as ‘not-pictures,’ as objects,” Willis once said. “I want my paintings to be very special kinds of objects that take their place in the world of objects, that engage and actually reach out and touch the viewer.”

Thornton Willis was born May 25, 1936, in Pensacola, Florida. His father was an evangelical preacher in the Church of Christ. Raised largely in Montgomery, Alabama, Willis spent three years in the Marine Corps following his graduation from high school. He attended Auburn University on the GI Bill before transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi, earning his BA there in 1962. In 1966, he received his MA from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where he studied under Melville Price. “[Price] was the biggest influence on my work before I came to New York,” he toldArt Talks in a 2021 interview.

Willis moved to New York in 1967, having taken a job teaching at Staten Island’s Wagner College. The following year, he received his inaugural solo exhibition, at Washington, DC’s Henri Gallery. In 1968, he moved into a loft at 119 Spring Street, joining the loose coalition of SoHo artists, such as Jack Whitten and Mary Heilmann, who did not belong to any one group, but hewed to their own disparate visions. Though Willis was influenced by the New York School, his oeuvre encompassed genres including Abstract Expressionism, lyrical abstraction, process art, postminimalism, Biomorphic Cubism (as Willis termed works in which intuition and geometry collided), and Color Field painting.

“Willis’s use of opacity and transparency, his joining of structure and gesture, and layering of paint as he worked out his composition, along with his refusal to seal the painting’s surface into a single, unified skin of paint, have become the hallmarks of his work,” wrote John Yau inHyperallergicin 2022. “These qualities connect him to both the gestural and the geometric branches of Abstract Expressionism, exemplified by Franz Kline and Barnett Newman.”

Willis’s works of the late 1960s came out of process art and featured stripes and grids, as embodied for example in his 1969 canvasWall, while those appearing in the mid-1970s and beyond centered geometric forms like the triangle and featured strong figure-ground tension (see hisBlack Bearof 1998). Whether blurry, as in the early “Slats” works, which Willis painted wet-on-wet from atop a ladder using a roller on canvas laid upon the floor; thick, as in some of the “Triangle” canvases of the 1990s and early 2000s; or crisp, as in works from the “Floating Lattice” series of recent years, boundaries and their overlap consumed the artist’s interest. “Edges are very important in my work,” he said. “They can be exciting places where things happen, like where the ocean meets the land and there’s lots of activity as animals scurry back and forth.”

Willis eventually moved his home and studio to Mercer Street, where he remained for decades, as the neighborhood changed from a hotbed of creativity to a high-end commercial hub thronged with tourists. “I do not romanticize the sweatshops that misused migrant or illegal workers,” he told the SoHo Memory Project. “But I miss the integrity of people working for a living to make a better world for their families.”

Willis received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1979, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1980 and 1984, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation fellowship in 2001. He was recently the subject of a six-decade survey at the David Richard Gallery in New York and was for years represented by the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, which shuttered in 2024. Willis’s work is held in the collections of such major institutions as the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Power Institute at the University of Sydney; and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden.