NEW YORK, NY.- Herman Cherry (1909-1992) was a vital part of the legendary New York School of painters, and like many in his generation, migrated away from figurative expression to abstraction beginning in the mid-1940s. Most writing about Cherry situates him among America’s celebrated abstract and color field artists. Less discussed are the artists—like Mark Tobey and Clyfford Still—whose approach to abstraction never abandoned a representational referent, most especially nature. They embraced what Wassily Kandinsky called “the spirit,” a need to express in color and form one’s inner self, without which there is no art. Equally influential in the years before the Second World War was Los Angeles-based artist and theorist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who co-conceived Synchromy, a method for using color based on optical and musical principles. Cherry’s interest in nature and his training under Macdonald-Wright in color theory during the 1930s distinguish him from the traditional New York School. Thinking about nature and abstraction together opens up a more dynamic way to understand Herman Cherry’s paintings.

The centrality of nature and strategies for its representation in abstract form are especially palpable in a series of paintings Cherry completed in the summer of 1970 at his home in East Hampton, New York. There he experimented with muted yet shimmering colors on neutral backgrounds. Each composition contains only what is necessary, an aesthetic not unlike the acute placement of forms in classic Japanese prints or the importance of line in traditional Chinese paintings. One of his favorite museums was the Freer Gallery of Art, now the National Museum of Asian Art, in Washington, D.C.; he would study the Japanese screens, where doing less, including leaving vast areas where no image was placed, yielded more. That Cherry also studied Chinese calligraphy is not surprising; the supreme control of line and forms in his painting is never in doubt, most especially in his mature work. Unlike artists who emerged during the 1960s, Cherry never used tape or pencil lines to establish his shapes. Such planning on canvas suggested drawings, and his painting method was free from predesign or illustration.

Cherry spent that summer of 1970 at his East Hampton home, devising a different style of painting in a series he referenced as either Summer or River, along with a number for each work. The curving paths and oblong shapes that run vertically down the picture plane suggest rivers and topographies, remembered vistas of the northern Midwest, Pacific Coast states, and farther north, Saskatchewan in Canada—places that became familiar to Cherry through temporary teaching and residency appointments beginning in 1965. But in the summer of 1970, no one apart from Cherry’s friends saw the series. He was without gallery representation, like many abstract painters who fell out of favor when market tastes leaned toward conceptual art. And another challenge of a more practical kind emerged: Cherry lost his longtime Cooper Square studio to developers in 1968, and the loft he purchased on Mercer Street a year later was in abysmal condition; he would spend over a year making it habitable. Thus, the summer of 1970 would prove to be a respite from life’s setbacks, a time of uninterrupted studio work. When Cherry finished the Rivers From 30,000 Feet canvases, he had no choice but to have them rolled up and stored.





Even though forty years had passed since Cherry studied art under Stanton Macdonald-Wright, his mentor’s theories about color, form and new technologies remained foundational. About Macdonald-Wright, Cherry told art critic Judd Tully, “It wasn’t that he taught me color. He made me see color.”1 In 1919 Macdonald-Wright wrote “Influence of Aviation on Art: The Accentuation of Individuality,” aspects of which are evident in Rivers From 30,000 Feet. Macdonald-Wright was interested in how the change in human vantage point represented by an aerial view would stimulate a different consciousness, the “realignment of individual perception, and, consequently, individual psychological and philosophical postures,” as his biographer Will South analyzed.2 Hostile to illustration in the fine arts, uninterested in literal renderings of earth as seen from above, Macdonald-Wright believed aerial views could awaken in artists new forms, new modes for representing pictorial tensions.

While the river idea might have been generated by Cherry’s time away teaching, the colors he selected for the Summer and River series of 1970 belong to Long Island: the brownish-green and gray-blue hues of the Atlantic; the orange, pink, and purple light streaking the sky at sunset; the yellow-green grass in the landscape surrounding Cherry’s home. Nearby, along Peconic Bay, a waterway that bisects the North and South Forks, sandy stretches of road yield tans and browns, punctuated by dark evergreen shrubs; these colors too are part of the ebb and flow of the day in East Hampton. River Series (E.H.), dedicated to East Hampton, is one of the larger paintings in the series, 78 inches long by 68 inches wide. The middle gray tone on the left contrasts with the white ground, built up through short, energetic strokes. Three earth-toned stripes—brown, brownish-black, and burnt orange—fall down the vertical axis, forming a semicircle that abruptly shifts near the midpoint and heads down, with a small bump or two along the way. Nestled next to the burnt-orange stripe is an oblong lavender shape. The right side of the painting contains different, lighter colors that yield a different mood. The top right corner, in burnt orange, feels brighter, lighter against white; the orange tone dominates, not the brown. Running at a gentle, sloping diagonal are two colored lines, pink (made jagged by the incursion of white painted strokes from the background) and powder blue. They are softer, like a sunset. And tucked into the right center is an oblong pale-yellow orb. The contrasting moods suggest night and day, the way a scene changes as the light lessens or increases. It is a magnificent painting in the way tension is suspended, wholeness maintained, despite the differences in color.

The play of burnt orange and lavender recurs in River Series #16, where the gray ground gives off a slight lavender sheen, but only on the right side. Cherry reserves the left for burnt orange, in a shape that edges toward a square, jutting into the middle of the canvas before turning into a rectangle as it moves down. Adjacent colors of red, powder blue, lavender, teal, and light blue with tones of green move around the orange and create a triangle void at the bottom left, and, curiously, at the top, another void where inexplicably the lavender, teal, and powder blue stripes are abruptly and precisely cut off. At the top right corner, the beginning (or ending) of three different colored stripes—magenta, hunter green, and burnt orange—peek into the frame and feel like the beginning of another painting. Lolling toward the bottom right is a field of purple, slightly trapezoid, nestled near the powder blue stripe. It is a curious painting; all the elements feel suspended, yet relational.

Cherry concluded the Summer and River series just as Minimalism and Land art were at the height of their ascendancy. Those styles stressed machine-made uniformity as a type of perfection, and most of the projects were based on ideas that could be communicated in language. And while in the late 1960s and 1970s such concepts felt new because of the scale and production methods of the works (requiring factories, construction workers, engineers), the lasting impact was in the rejection of the handmade. Amid industrialization and postindustrialization, making things by hand is frequently framed as romantic or sentimental.

But are Cherry’s paintings from 1970 romantic—or sentimental? From the vantage point of 2026 it is difficult to characterize them as either. They were not a departure from all he had produced in the 1960s but rather an experiment in paring down, simplifying. Cherry’s aesthetic leans into the handmade, having still something viable, important to express in one of the world’s oldest mediums. Even though Cherry’s control of line and form is masterful, none of the shapes is geometrically perfect. And that is deliberate, evidence of his gestural coordination, his signature. Abstract painting forces thinking and looking closely at color, line, and form without the interplay of recognizable imagery. But the paintings also invite the viewer to feel something about scale, the interplay of color, and contemplate the same colors experienced differently because of the background and adjacency of other colors. These are primary concepts, carried from his years under Macdonald-Wright’s tutelage, to all he internalized about color and form from diverse cultural expression. Viewing the Summer and River series offers a reconnection with nature, how landscape feels, what Clyfford Still identified as the search for universal forms, outside of language, “unencumbered by verbal associations.”3 Cherry shows how light plays on the land and water; the way water refracts the light and reveals color properties distinct to a time and place. Herman Cherry mapped this experience for all of us to explore anew.

By Melissa Rachleff

1. Judd Tully, “Herman Cherry--A Retrospective,” reprinted in Judd Tully: Art Critic, Journalist, and Filmmaker, January 1, 1989, https://juddtully.net/articles/herman-cherry-a-retrospective/

2. Will South, “Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973): From Synchromism to the Federal Art Projects” (Ph.D. diss., The City University of New York, 1994), 118.
3. Clyfford Still, “From the Artist: Introduction, Notes and Letters,” in Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O’Neill (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 19.