Thunder Over the Sea

New York native Balcomb Greene came to art only after launching a career as a college English professor and marrying a practicing artist. Beginning in the 1930s, he executed geometric abstractions which—over time and against the modern trend toward non-representational art—included the human form. Greene was also fascinated by the sea, which he captured with bold brushwork and a muted palette, as seen in this energetic example. Known as an iconoclastisc and articulate intellectual, Greene believed that art should be “ambiguous so the viewer has to enter in.” Greene spent the summer of 1946 at Black Mountain College as a lecturer in art history.