JOHN ARTHUR

 INDEPENDENT CURATOR

John Arthur has been acknowledged internationally as the leading authority on contemporary American realism and figurative painting. His books and exhibition catalogues include Richard Estes: The Urban Landscape (Boston Museum of Fine Arts & Little Brown), Realist Drawings and Watercolors (NYGS-Little Brown) Realism / Photorealism (Philbrook Art Museum & University of Missouri Press), Robert Cottingham: The Complete Prints (Springfield Art Museum & University of Washington Press), Realists at Work: Studio Interviews and Working Methods of Ten Contemporary Realists (Watson Guptill), Spirit of Place: Contemporary Landscape Painting & the American Tradition (Bulfinch-Little Brown), Richard Estes: Paintings and Prints (Pomegranate Artbooks), and Green Woods & Crystal Waters: The American Landscape Tradition (Philbrook Museum & University of Washington Press).

Arthur has curated numerous exhibits, including America 1976, a Bicentennial project sponsored by the United States Department of the Interior. It opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and toured major American museums for two years. He organized mid-career retrospectives of the paintings of Jack Beal (Boston University Art Gallery, Virginia Museum, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art), Richard Estes (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art) and Alfred Leslie (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art).

He has served on advisory panels for the National Endowment of the Arts, Department of the Interior, National Science Foundation, GSA Art and Architecture Program, and the Department of State. Since 1975 he has advised private collectors, galleries, and museums in the U.S., Europe, and Japan.

Arthur has curated three major exhibitions for Japan—American Realism: The Precise Image, Richard Estes 1990, and American Realism & Figurative Art: 1962-1990. Under the sponsorship of the Isetan Museum, Tokyo, he toured Japan with Richard Estes in 1989, which resulted in Estes’s Japan Paintings. In 1991 he traveled for three weeks with the painter Philip Pearlstein under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and the American Embassy. They lectured at the Miyagi Museum of Art (Sendai), the Sapporo American Center, Tokushima Museum of Art, and the American Center in Tokyo.

In addition to numerous essays, reviews, interviews, and articles, Arthur wrote the foreword to an updated and expanded edition of John Baeder’s Diners (Abrams, NY.)

Arthur’s interest in architecture was first kindled by the Mike Wallace interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957, and he acknowledges that his attitudes and esthetic position on art, architecture, and music were shaped by the visionary architect, Bruce Goff. In 1996 he wrote a lengthy foreword for The House Beautiful, a book designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and printed by Wright and William H. Winslow in 1896-98. It was the first trade edition (Pomegranate Artbooks) to be published of the extremely rare original edition.

The author is the former director of the Boston University Art Gallery. He was a member of the Newton Historical Commission for twelve years before moving to western Massachusetts where he is currently restoring an Arts and Crafts bungalow.