Ray Spillenger Bio

Ray Spillenger was born in on October 24, 1924. He attended James Madison High School and before enlisting as an Army Air Corps pilot in World War II, during which he flew extremely dangerous supply missions over “The Hump” (the eastern Himalayas) in Burma, China and India, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. After mustering out in 1946, Spillenger completed his certificate in commercial design at Pratt and attended the legendary Summer 1948 session at , where he studied with and with , who would remain a lifelong friend. After 18 months studying in Rome and Florence, he returned to New York in 1951 and quickly became part of the downtown art scene, meeting , with whom he’d remain close until Kline’s death in 1962, , , Esteban Vicente, Theodoros Stamos, Aristodimos Kaldis, George Spaventa, James Rosati and other mainstays of the group. He was an original member of the March Gallery (1957-1962), along with Elaine de Kooning, Pat Passlof, Mark di Suvero and others, which was located in the basement of his apartment building at 95 E. 10th St. He showed at the Annuals from 1953 to 1955.

Spillenger married Marian Katz in 1955 and had two sons with her, Paul (b. 1956) and Clyde (b. 1960). He continued painting into the 1970s and then stopped for 15 years, frustrated by the growing “Disneyfication,” as he put it, of the art world, and the dissolution of the movement that had helped define him. He put his , brushes and paint away and devoted himself to earning a living and community activism, helping to fight off the incursions of real estate developers into the East Village.

In the mid-1990s, Ray Spillenger returned to painting, this time in a very different vein, attending life drawing classes where he turned out thousands of drawings in black wash, mainly female nudes, which incorporated and distilled many of his past influences – his time in Italy studying the Renaissance masters of the human form and his experience with the possibilities of abstraction at Black Mountain – but free from the youthful imperative to “paint the big painting.” He would later say that this was the most free he’d ever felt as a painter. He’d once said that “all abstraction is yearning toward representation”; in this final phase of his life as an artist, he showed how representation can also “yearn toward” abstraction.

After Marian died of cancer in 1997, Spillenger continued to live in the 10th St. apartment, painting, drawing and revising old work. For the last three years of his life, he suffered increasingly from dementia and was unable to paint. To the end, he refused to allow anyone to organize a show of his work. He died in 2013 of a pulmonary embolism, at the age of 89, the last – or certainly one of the last – of that brilliant group of artists to go.

In February 2014, noted art historian and curator Theodore Stebbins of Harvard’s Fogg visited the 10th St. apartment and was astounded at what he saw there.

“They’re the real deal; he’s the real deal,” he said after several hours poring over the paintings. Stebbins agreed to help Spillenger’s sons get the work seen.

“In the fifties, Ray is painting pictures as good as anyone – fantastic museum-quality pictures,” Stebbins has said.

In April 2014, published an article on Ray Spillenger and the rediscovery of his work on the front page of its Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section, which started to generate interest in him. Helen Molesworth, then Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, chose one of his paintings for Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957, the first comprehensive museum exhibition on Black Mountain artists, which ran at ICA from October 2015 to January 2016 and then traveled to Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (February-May 2016) and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (September 2016-January 2017).

In January 2016, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, N.C., organized a show of Spillenger’s work, mainly from the late 40s and early 50s, curated by Stebbins and accompanied by a catalogue; Ray Spillenger: Rediscovery of a Black Mountain Painter ran through May. Later that year, The Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College in New York hosted a Spillenger exhibition that ran from September through December. Around the same time, Hirschl & Adler Modern in included several Spillenger paintings in its group show Outside the Lines: American Abstraction in the 20th Century, which also showcased the work of Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan and Al Leslie. Hirschl & Adler currently has three Spillengers in its collection.