Like his paintings, Thornton Willis was unassuming but indomitable.
Asked by an interviewer in 2019 how he had felt about movements, like Minimalism and Conceptualism, that threatened to replace his medium with newer approaches, Mr. Willis replied, “I just kept painting,” before adding, with characteristic humor and modesty, “So did a lot of other people, though.”
What he was painting — or, in a sense, defending — was a unique brand of geometric abstraction imbued with the energy, personality and intense material focus of the midcentury New York School.
Beginning with horizontal stripes and proceeding through zigzags, wedges, lattices, triangles and crenelated shapes, often rendered on very large canvases, Mr. Willis spent a lifetime patiently excavating the problems and possibilities of the painted surface — in terms of color, texture, process and space.
His first well-known series, which he called “Slat” paintings, was made on the floor with four-inch paint rollers. For a few years in the 1970s, he gained widespread recognition and success with his wedges — upright, mesa-like shapes reminiscent of box-cutter blades. Then he dropped them in favor of overlapping lines and patterns of triangles that evoked isometric drawing. However the details evolved, his interest in creating balance and tension out of nothingness, in converting his own passing emotions into colors and brushstrokes, never wavered.
“In a sense, I’ve been painting the same painting since I started,” he suggested in the 2009 documentary short “Portrait of an American Artist,” directed by Michael Feldman. “It’s like each painting is still sort of part of the painting before. It just seems somewhat impractical to work on the same actual canvas for an entire lifetime, and so you sort of move on — but each painting is kind of a segue into the next.”
Thornton Willis died in Manhattan on June 15. He was 89. His wife, the painter Vered Lieb, said that he died in a hospital from complications of Covid and pneumonia.
Though Mr. Willis was deeply affected by the action and grit of painters like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, he also took in such ostensibly contrary influences as Piet Mondrian and later hard-edge painters, resolving them all in canvases that balanced rich, organic brushwork against precisely organized, rigorously abstract composition.
Often improvisatory but generally also with a touch of engineering about them, his paintings demanded sustained attention. From a certain distance, the arrangements of color and shape would seem to be the point, whether large or small, simple or complex. On closer view, those same thoughtful patterns dissolve into mere scaffolds for innumerable small decisions about the application of paint.
In his 2014 painting “Three Totems,” three vertical yellow bars nearly six feet tall float on a purple ground; four bars seem to overlap in an endless rectangle in “Rashomon” (1986); and in “A Painting for You,” made in 1988, irregular pieces dazzle in half a dozen colors.
His own influence was both broad and substantial. Artists who visited his studio included the painters Brice Marden and Sean Scully, and the sculptor Richard Serra. In a phone interview, the painter James Little, a close friend, called him “a major American painter” who “punched above his weight and stayed there.” The painter Neil Jenney, in remarks at a memorial service, declared, “With the passing of Thornton Willis, we say goodbye to the greatest Abstract Expressionist of them all.”
Thornton Wilson Willis was born in Pensacola, Fla., on May 25, 1936, the elder of two sons of Edna Mae (Hall) Willis and Willard Willis, a Church of Christ minister.
Mr. Willis’s family moved frequently around Florida and Alabama as his father took up posts in different congregations. His mother had a nervous breakdown and was eventually committed to a state institution. By high school he and his brother were back in Pensacola, living with their paternal grandparents.
After serving in the Marine Corps for three years, Mr. Willis went to school on the G.I. Bill, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1962.
Though he had drawn well as a child and been keenly interested in the Sunday comics, his first exposure to the larger art world came in a college art appreciation class, which introduced him to Cézanne, van Gogh and Picasso. While he was briefly enrolled as an architecture student at Auburn University in Alabama, a show of work by students of Hans Hofmann came to campus and changed his life: Mr. Willis visited every day for a month.
In 1964, he enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, to study with the painter Melville Price, who became a close friend and mentor. In a 2009 essay, Mr. Willis recalled marching “hand in hand up Dexter Avenue” in Montgomery with Mr. Price and his wife during one of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 marches.
In 1967, after teaching in Mississippi for a year, Mr. Willis moved north for a job at Wagner College on Staten Island.
“Everybody went around saying, ‘Painting’s dead,’” he said in a 2022 interview, describing the atmosphere at this time. “I said, ‘OK, painting’s dead.’ And I got to New York, and it wasn’t dead at all.”
Soon he had found a loft in Chelsea, and then one on Spring Street in SoHo; had his first solo show, at Henri Gallery in Washington, D.C.; and quit teaching. In SoHo, he was immersed in a vibrant artistic community: the artists Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark were his neighbors, and the graffiti-marked brick walls visible in the neighborhood’s many vacant lots inspired him.
In 1972, short on money, he accepted a job at Louisiana State University in New Orleans and left New York. When he returned, two years later, the painter Stewart Hitch introduced him to Ms. Lieb, who was looking to sell a loft on Canal Street before leaving town herself. Instead, the two soon found a new place to share, with room for a studio, on Mercer Street. Mr. Willis remained there with Ms. Lieb for the rest of his life.
In addition to Ms. Lieb, he is survived by their daughter, Rachel Willis, who owns the clothing store Landline Vintage on the Lower East Side, and Mr. Willis’s son, David Willis, a medical editor, from his marriage to Peggy Whisenhant. His marriages to Ms. Whisenhant and Jane Miles ended in divorce.
Beginning in 1979, Mr. Willis had a run of success. A well-received show at the cooperative gallery 55 Mercer led to interest from the Oscarsson Hood Gallery, which showed him through the 1980s, and from the prominent dealer Sidney Janis. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979 and a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980.
Around 1982, Ms. Lieb said, something changed.
“He decided he couldn’t do another wedge,” she recalled. “I said, ‘No, Thornton, we’ve been so broke, and we’re finally getting some money!’”
But Mr. Willis didn’t have it in him to make art that was anything but authentic self-expression. When the critic James Panero asked in “Portrait of an American Artist” what one could learn about Mr. Willis by looking at his paintings, he replied, “That I’m an honest, straightforward person — that I’m struggling to deal with what I feel is real, for me, in a confusing world.”
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
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