Alfred Russell was born May 22, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He began painting in 1935 and attended the Arts Student's League on scholarship in 1940. By 1943, he had earned a BA in English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he studied with W.H. Auden. This was followed by a fellowship at the University of Iowa's graduate writing program, where he first met Philip Guston. In 1944, he began working alongside Stanley William Hayter at the New York workshop of Atelier 17, where he would produce his first abstract works. The following year, Russell entered Columbia University to study Greek and Roman Art under the eminent classical archaeology scholar Margarete Bieber, culminating in an MA in 1946, at the moment his career began taking off with an exhibition of drawings at the Weyhe Gallery.

The next year in New York, Russell had his first one-person exhibition of abstract surrealist works at the Laurel Gallery. Also in 1947, at Hayter's suggestion, Russell joined the newly formed modernist faculty under Robert Jay Wolf at Brooklyn College. The following year saw an exhibition in his hometown of Grosse Pointe, at the Alexander Gerard Gallery. In the summer of 1948, with an introduction from Hayter, Russell traveled to Paris and soon fell in with many members of the postwar avant garde. In 1950 Ad Reinhardt, a charter member of the newly formed Artist's Club, brought Russell in as a regular member. The two collaborated on humorous collage critiques of the art world. They also shared, as Philip Pavia has recorded, an interest in developing abstract "sense impressions" in pursuit of the "psychic plane," that for him characterized the first wave of New York School painters.

Russell's breakout show of the so-called "street" abstractions was held at the Peridot Gallery in 1950. After spending most of 1951 painting in Paris for a highly successful and influential show at Galerie Colette Allendy, Russell returned to Peridot with a follow up show including several works in which ambiguous abstract figures began to emerge from a field of forces.

During this period (1946-53), Russell was shown in major museum exhibitions at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1946), Abstract and Surrealist American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (1947-48), the Brooklyn Museum (1949, 1951), the Whitney Museum Annual (1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953 and 1954), and MOMA’s pivotal show Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (1951). Also of considerable significance were numerous group shows at: the Leicester Gallery, London (1946, 1947), Buchholz Gallery, New York (1947), Galerie Pierre Loeb, Paris (1948), Galerie de Deux Iles, Paris (1948), the New Talent show at Kootz Gallery, New York (1950), Peridot Gallery (1949-53), Véhémences Confrontées, Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris (1951, then in Rome and Milan), Regards sur la Peintre Américaine, Galerie de France, Paris (1951), Sculpture by Painters, Peridot Gallery, New York (1951), Exposition de Gravures (organized by MOMA), L’Ambassade des États-Unis, Paris (1951), American Vanguard Art for Paris, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (1952), Avant-garde U.S. Painters, Galerie de France, Paris (1952), Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture Annual, University at Illinois, Urbana (1952,1953), Coast to Coast U.S. Painting, Galerie Craven, Paris (1953), and the Second Stable Gallery Show, Stable Gallery, New York (1953).

Russell’s third solo show at Peridot Gallery (1952) was his first entirely comprised of painterly figures, and he followed it a few years later at Duveen-Graham Gallery, New York (1957) with anti-realist works. For a sixth time, he was in a Whitney Museum Annual (1954) and the following year saw him in the Whitney Museum’s The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors (1955-56), which traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art, University of California at Los Angeles, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and the City Art Museum of St. Louis. In 1959 he participated in Contemporary Drawings at the New York Art Center Gallery and in 1960, American Drawings at New York's National Arts Club.

La Rue Pernety, 1950, oil on canvas, 52 " x 30", Private Collection

In 1953, Russell made an outspoken break with the abstract expressionist painters on a panel at the Ab-Ex “Club,” then turning mainly to figurative art. After an exhibition of abstractions in 1960 at the Ruth White Gallery—voted one of the ten best exhibitions of 1960 by ARTnews—Russell withdrew from exhibiting altogether, paralleling Duchamp’s avowal that artists should go “underground” to maintain their sense of purpose against the pressures of the marketplace. His rare appearances were out of loyalty to friends: in 1962 he participated in Hayter and Atelier 17, Institute of Contemporary Arts Gallery, London, and in 1973 he contributed work to a memorial exhibition for his former dealer Lou Pollack, at Peridot Gallery, New York.

He became an underground legend to several generations of figurative artists, a number of whom had studied with him at Brooklyn College until 1974 when he retired. In 1977, the Brooklyn Museum featured a fifty-year retrospective of Atelier 17. That same year, both the galleries Robert Schoelkopf and Davis and Long Co. collaborated to celebrate the historically important modernist art department of Brooklyn College. In 1979, at the insistence of several painters, a clutch of seventies figure compositions were shown at the Peter Tatistcheff Gallery, briefly returning Russell to visibility in New York. Later that year, the show traveled to the Bayly Art Museum, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

In a 1986 show of Modern Prints at Mary Ryan Gallery, New York, early Russell prints surfaced. Two years later, he appeared in Fictional Images, Contemporary Figurative Painting at the Montserrat College of Art, Boston, MA. In 1990, Russell participated in The Italian Tradition in Contemporary American Landscape Painting, 1960-1990, held at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The following year, also in Charleston, the Civitico-Berg Gallery mounted a selective retrospective in conjunction with the Spoleto Festival. This was followed in September 1991 by an exhibition of figurative works at the Contemporary Realist Gallery in San Francisco.

In 1994, Paris's Artcurial gallery mounted Quelque Chose de Très Mystérieux, aesthetic intuitions of Michel Tapié, where Russell was reaffirmed as a significant bridge figure between the art cultures of Paris and New York. A number of figurative works were shown at his second one-person show at San Francisco's Hackett-Freedman Gallery (previously the Contemporary Realist Gallery, site of his 1991 exhibition) in January 1997.

In 2001 Russell was represented in the blockbuster show called Between Earth and Heaven, New Classical Movements in the Art of Today at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Oostende, Belgium. In 2005, he was featured in Between Perception and Invention: Three Generations of Figurative Artists at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, New Hampshire. This was followed in 2007 by a major historical exhibition curated by Serge Guilbaut, Be-Bomb, The Transatlantic War of Images and all that Jazz 1946-1956 at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain. (Russell died at age 87 in New York on September 22, 2007.) 

In 2021, Russell was included in the Musée D'Arts De Nantes' exhibition United States of Abstraction, Artistes americains en France, 1946-1964, which also traveled to the Musée Fabre in Montpellier. From March 2 through July 20, 2024, Russell is represented in Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Post-War France, 1946-1962 at NYU's Grey Art Gallery which will then travel to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA, where it will be on view from September through December 2024. A third venue is NYU Abu Dhabi from February 11-June 1, 2025. 

Russell is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

In recent years, Russell’s works and writings have begun to reappear in scholarly books and major exhibitions internationally. Yet to date, the range of his explorations is little known, paralleling aspects of a number of notable contemporary abstract artists such as Steve di Benedetto, Julie Mehretu, Chris Martin, Peter Halley, Terry Winters, and older painters such as Brice Marden, Alfred Jensen, and Al Held.

Russell’s early figurative expressionism was an early example to Leon Golub, and his later hybrid anti-realist works forecast the European post-modernism of Carlo Maria Mariani, Stephen McKenna, Bruno d’Arcevia, and the Americans Bruno Civitico, Richard Piccolo, Richard Chiriani, Lincoln Perry, and Ted Schmidt. Key traits of Russell’s tragic quasi-classical vision have included a haunted nostalgia for a long-lost or nonexistent Golden Age, a longing for the absent gods, and rational order in the face of the concept of nothingness.

Here uniquely, Russell moves between metaphysics and physics, where something is defined against nothing by its velocity and fluctuation in space-time, rather than true classical form. Thus, the unity of Russell’s bifurcated work consists in the way he has been able to bring his readings of the pre-Socratic schools, the Eleatics and the Atomists, together with the existential thinking of Martin Heidegger and Hans Gadamer, to re-form pictorial languages of the past and recent past into “meta-forms” that evoke the current conception of the universe and our place in it.

© 2024 David Carbone

Maxwell's Demon, 1989-90, oil on canvas, 52" x 40"