Robert Courtright

Robert Courtright's curiosity about historical architecture began in his hometown library in Sumter, South Carolina. Not much is known about his childhood except that he attended Edmunds High School, where he was a member of the school band. He graduated in 1943. Following studies at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and the New School for Social Research in New York, Courtright enrolled at the Art Students League, where his instructors were Jack Levine, Robert Brackman, Carl Holty, and Vaclav Vytlacil. His continued fascination with architecture and aesthetics drew him to Rome in 1953, where he first began to create the collages for which he is most widely known. In an interview he admitted: "I've always been terrifically influenced by Italian 14th and 15th century artists."

Courtright's architectural collages, which often incorporate scraps of paper pulled directly from actual structures, dominated the artist's oeuvre in the 1960s. These pieces eventually inspired his series of non-representational grid collages, about which he said: "I am trying to create a picture… the same way you would write a sonnet." The artist and critic J. Bowyer Bell offered this observation of Courtright's grids: "The real visual drama is . . . in the perception of each viewer. The grid merges into the whole, color moves across the surface, differences in intensity appear . . . an image rises from the squares, from the object. There is nothing minimal, nothing cold, nothing as exercise in the ultimate image. Each is an adventure for the eye."

Along with short sojourns spent in New York, Courtright spent most of his career as an expatriate; he left Italy in the 1970s, settling in Opio not far from Nice in southern France. While there, he inaugurated a new body of work—masks, inspired by the Commedia dell' Arte which he executed in marble, stone, cast bronze, and cast paper.

Courtright's work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Phillips Collection in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the South Carolina Arts Commission state art collection.