Paul Feeley American, 1910-1966

Paul Feeley was an American painter and influential teacher associated with Color Field painting and postwar abstraction. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he briefly attended Menlo Junior College before moving to New York to study at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Vincent DuMond, and George Bridgman. Although his formal training was relatively brief, Feeley quickly established himself as both an artist and educator, teaching at Cooper Union from 1932 to 1939 and then at Bennington College, where he led the art department for nearly three decades.

At Bennington, Feeley played a crucial role in shaping the development of American modernism, introducing students—including Helen Frankenthaler—to leading contemporary artists. He also organized early retrospective exhibitions for figures such as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and David Smith, helping to solidify their reputations. His own early work was more gestural and loosely structured, but over time he developed a highly refined visual language based on simplified forms and vibrant color relationships.

By the 1960s, Feeley’s paintings had evolved into compositions of bold, often symmetrical shapes set against flat fields of color. His work from this period reflects a strong interest in seriality and repetition, particularly in his well-known “jack” paintings (1962–66), which explore variations on a single motif. These works align him with contemporaries in Minimalism and Pop art, while maintaining a unique balance of formal rigor and playful vitality.

Feeley exhibited widely during his lifetime, with solo shows at prominent galleries including Tibor de Nagy Gallery and the Betty Parsons Gallery, and his work was featured in major exhibitions such as Post Painterly Abstraction (1964) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Responsive Eye (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art, and Systemic Painting (1966) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Following his death, the Guggenheim organized a memorial retrospective in 1968, and later major surveys have reaffirmed his importance in American art.

Today, Feeley’s work is held in numerous major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among many others. He is recognized not only for his distinctive contributions to abstract painting but also for his lasting influence as a teacher and advocate for modern art.