Joe Downing (1925–2007)
Born Joseph Dudley Downing in Tompkinsville, Kentucky, and raised in nearby Horse Cave, Joe Downing came to art by an unlikely route.
He served in Europe during the Second World War, studied briefly at Western Kentucky University, and was steered toward a career in optometry in Chicago, until classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago convinced him his future lay in painting. In 1950 he settled in France, the country he had first glimpsed as a soldier, and never left.
Paris confirmed him quickly. He held his first one-man exhibition in the city in 1952, a show attended by Pablo Picasso, who pronounced it “well done” and went on to become one of only a handful of American artists to exhibit at the Louvre.
A Franco-American abstractionist often called a poet of color and light, Downing built luminous, collage-like compositions and delighted in unusual supports, painting on old doors, windows, tiles and leather, and later creating porcelain for the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres.
He divided his life between Paris and the Provençal village of Ménerbes, where he died in 2007. His work is held in major collections including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
