Cherry, Herman

Herman Cherry (1909–1992) was a non-objective abstract painter who participated in all five of the artist-curated Stable Gallery exhibitions in Manhattan between 1953 and 1957 and who received his first New York solo exhibition at Stable in 1955. In the early 1930s, he was a student first of the synchromist painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright at the Art Students League of Los Angeles and next of the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League of New York. Afterward, Cherry managed a small gallery within a Hollywood bookshop where he gave Philip Guston his first exhibition and where his own first solo was later held. Having transitioned from social realism to cubist-inspired abstraction in the 1940s, Cherry joined with the artists who later became collectively known as the New York School in establishing a style that later became known as Abstract expressionism. Key members of this group were Cherry's friends Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. Cherry's mature works were entirely abstract. Known as a masterful colorist, he often received favorable attention from critics and art historians. In 1984, the art historian Helen A. Harrison wrote: "At a time when many artists...