George Negroponte: Straddling the Studio and the Museum

Many notable artists — among them Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Brice Marden — worked at museums early in their careers, usually as security guards, but few kept one foot in the studio and one in a museum for three decades. George Negroponte managed to do just that. 

Since his first show at the Drawing Center in SoHo in 1977, his work has appeared in dozens of museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the world. Impressed by the breadth and clarity of the Drawing Center’s mission, he joined the staff in 1977 and eventually organized exhibitions, served on its board from 1991 to 2002, and as its president from 2002 until 2007. He remains a trustee emeritus. 

“I had fantastic dealers in New York, but somewhere in the back of my mind I probably felt some dissatisfaction with the marketplace and with my own work,” he said during a recent talk at his Springs studio. “So I did those two things, my art and the Drawing Center. It was fascinating to experience both the institution and my own studio.”

Mr. Negroponte and his twin brother, Michel, were born in New York City in 1953, the youngest of four boys. His parents were Greek citizens who came to the United States in 1939. “My father and mother probably guided us toward subjects that had either historical or cultural motivations.” His mother worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jacob Bean, the curator of drawings, and she became friends with Henry Geldzahler, the museum’s first curator of 20th-century art. Mr. Negroponte’s father was a serious Sunday painter who copied the work of Cézanne.

“Because Michel and I used the Met as a playground, we were able to study quattrocento drawings, as Jacob thought it would be nice for us to see and even handle them. We also would go over to study what Henry was up to. We were there when he installed his landmark show ‘New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970.’ So at the age of 16 or 17, I came into contact with Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Larry Poons. Art making became a tangible thing for me, and something I felt very close to.”

Mr. Negroponte enrolled in Yale in 1971 with a vague intention to study architecture. “I had an interest in building and form, but all the prerequisites for architecture were studio classes.” He took the legendary color class originated by Josef Albers and studied with Bernard Chaet, who was instrumental in transforming Yale’s art program into one that gained national prominence.

His classmates at Yale included such gifted artists as Frank Moore and Peter Halley, while Judy Pfaff, Nabil Nahas, Louisa Chase, and Haim Steinbach were among the graduate students at that time. Mr. Negroponte feels lucky to have been a part of that artistic community, but, he said, something very different was happening at Cal Arts in Los Angeles.

“You had John Baldessari teaching a kind of deconstruction of the Yale idea. We were considered too formalist, too theoretical, too pure, and probably too abstract. So a lot of us ended up in New York in the mid-1970s feeling that to some extent the education we had received put us at the lower end of the totem pole. I had to work hard at testing my own convictions.” 

Always rooted in abstraction, those convictions went through changes and refinements. During the 1980s Mr. Negroponte made large abstract paintings with a small brush. “Over the years my brush got bigger and bigger; I was making paintings that were about weaving form. I thought they were pretty good, but I kept sensing I had hit a point where I just couldn’t get them to the next level.” 

In the mid-1990s he encountered the drawings of Victor Hugo at the Krugier Gallery in New York. “I had no idea that somebody in the 1840s and 1850s had made something that was so close to abstraction. The work fascinated me, and we did this huge show of his drawings at the Drawing Center, ‘Shadows of a Hand.’ ”

Mr. Negroponte started to work on paper, tearing it down and bringing pieces together. “I could spend an entire day just making different marks on different pieces of paper. I would lay them all out on the floor, put some of them away, put some of them on the wall, and then go to another body of work. It was almost as if I were curating my own work. And that’s how I work on the pieces I’m doing now.”

He keeps remnants of things he has been working on for years.

For his most recent work, which is on view in a solo exhibition at Anita Rogers Gallery in SoHo, he has used premixed hardware store paint and discarded cardboard, pieces of which are stacked and superimposed and pinned to the wall. 

He has described his way of working as “cut-and-build. There is clearly a kind of architecture I’m pursuing in that the image is not necessarily rectangular. One piece was made six months ago, another was made last week, and they’re brought together. If they work, they work, and a kind of fusion takes place. That’s one of the things collage often does. When you bring the edges together you really do somehow impact the image in a way that’s very different, let’s say, from the skin of a painting.”

Mr. Negroponte and his wife, Virva Hinnemo, also an artist, moved to Springs with their three sons in 2012. “Virva is happy here, my children are happy here, and, as my oldest brother, John, says to me, that’s 95 percent of the battle.” While he misses the culture of the city, Mr. Negroponte sees a trade-off. “The big problem with the city is you have a tendency to feel that people are looking over your shoulder. Out here I’m able to very quietly work on what I need to do without that pressure, without thinking about what the next show or the next piece will look like.”

“Here I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting. I realize that as far back as 2006 I made a conscious decision to leave certain things behind. I knew the scale would be different, I knew that canvas and stretchers were not going to be part of the next phase. The thing that really remained the same and is so important to me is the relationship of the object to the wall. I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of fresco painter.”

Mr. Negroponte left the Drawing Center in 2007, after having taken a leading role in the effort to move the center to ground zero, as part of what was initially envisioned by Daniel Libeskind as a cultural complex. By 2005, the Drawing Center was one of four organizations still in the mix, but eventually the idea of a cultural complex was scrapped altogether.

“The politics of New York and the politics of ground zero ultimately doomed that idea. I regret that it didn’t get done. I felt I had a chance to do something for a city that I really, really love, and it didn’t happen. But it probably pushed me to take most of my mental resources and put them back into the studio. And for that I’m very happy!”