American (1905-1970)

Gertrude Stein wrote of Ferren in her autobiography:

“[Ferren] is the only American painter in Paris that foreign painters consider as a painter, and whose painting interests them. . . “

 American abstract painter John Ferren is the only artist who was both an innercircle member of the Parisian avant garde of the 1930s and the group of New York School artists of the 1940s and 1950s.

As a young man Ferren attended classes at the San Francisco Art School, and then apprenticed with an Italian stonecutter in San Francisco. Ferren visited Europe for the first time in 1929. Together with Hans Hofmann he attended a Henri Matisse exhibition in Munich that so stimulated his interest in color that he abandoned sculpture for painting. Ferren returned to Europe in 1931  and settled in Paris for the next eight years. There he befriended Gertrude Stein and other members of the Parisian avant-garde.  

Ferren soon fell in with the group of avant garde artists in Paris, becoming especially close to Piet Mondrian, Jean Hélion, Joan Miró, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Pablo Picasso, for whom Ferren helped stretch the canvas for Guernica. During his residence in Paris, Ferren experimented with various modes of abstract painting. He was deeply influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Robert Delaunay, and especially Hélion, whose curved lines and volumetric forms Ferren sought to adapt to his own work.

Ferren married Laure Ortiz de Zarate, the daughter of a Spanish painter, in 1932, and she introduced him to a number of Spanish modernists active in Paris. This led directly to Ferren’s introduction to, and membership in, the Abstraction-Création group, which was founded in 1931 in opposition to Surrealism. Like the other members of the group, Ferren derided Surrealism’s anachronistic and retrogressive painting techniques, but Ferren did acknowledge the influence of Surrealism’s emphasis on the unconscious on the development of his own work. This dovetailed with Ferren’s own interest in Eastern philosophies, including Zen Buddhism and Taoism, dating from his early years in San Francisco. From these philosophies Ferren came to prize chance and spontaneity in the act of artistic creation.

Ferren visited New York in 1938 to oversee the installation of an exhibition of his work at the prestigious Pierre Matisse Gallery. With war on the horizon, Ferren did not return to Paris. Ferren fell in with the American Abstract Artists group and got to know its leading members Albert E. Gallatin, George L. K. Morris, Charles Shaw, and Carl Holty.

By the end of the 1940s, Ferren returned to abstraction. He was an early member of The Club, the nucleus of the Abstract Expressionist movement located in an Eighth Street loft. He now painted in bold, colorful style very much in the New York School idiom. In the 1960s, Ferren shared a property in the Hamptons with Willem de Kooning, and was a central figure on the scene in the artists’ enclaves of Long Island until his death in 1970.

His work can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Whitney, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the High Museum and the Hirshhorn, among others.