John Ferren

     TITLE: none

     MEDIUM: water color

     CREATED: 1964

     SIGNED: Yes

     SIZE: 10″ x 13″

John Ferren  (1905 – 1970)

John Ferren (1905–1970) was an American artist. In his 20s, he apprenticed as a stonecutter in San Francisco, California. He is noted for his success in France as an American artist. Writer Gertrude Stein said of him “Ferren ought be a man who is interesting, he is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose paintings interest them. He is young yet and might do … that thing called abstract painting.”

For a short time, Ferren was an art school student in San Francisco. By the mid-1920s, Ferren was producing portrait busts. It was also around this time that he became interested in Buddhist and Eastern philosophy. By the early 1930s, he was attending the Académie Ranson, and the Sorbonne, Académie de la Grande Chaumiere. Although for the most part not formally educated, preferring to develop his art through an adventurous life style, and interaction with other artists, he was known as an intellectual among his peers. He wrote many published articles on abstract art and art theory.

While in Paris, Ferren was part of the community of artists working in Europe in the 1920s and 30s, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hans Hofmann, Joaquín Torres-García, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. He became quite friendly with Picasso who mentored him, and together they stretched the canvas for Guernica, in 1937.