John Dobbs (1931-2011) American, Abstract Figural Oil on Canvas. Signed bottom left. Original gallery tag on back of canvas with name, medium, size, price, and title: "The Guardian of the Absolute." 

Overall: 21 3/4 X 18 in. 

Sight: 15 3/4 X 12 1/4 in. 

#3890 . 

John Barnes Dobbs was born in 1931 in Nutley, New Jersey. He grew up in a politically engaged family of artists, musicians, and poets. At 18, after graduating from high school, Dobbs hoisted a duffle bag onto his shoulder and hitchhiked cross-country. He worked at a variety of odd jobs before returning to the East Coast to study painting with Ben Shahn, Gregorio Prestopino and Jack Levine, who became his mentor and life-long friend. Although he studied with several painters during his twenties, he always referred to himself as a “self-taught” artist. In 1952 Dobbs was drafted into the Army and stationed in Germany. He brought along a sketchbook, which he filled with drawings of soldiers and post-war German life, later published in 1955 as a chapbook called “Drawings of a Draftee.” After returning to the United States Dobbs married French-Algerian literary scholar Anne Baudement and had his first solo show at the Grippi Gallery in New York in 1959. Four years later painter Raphael Soyer included Dobbs with eight other figurative artists including Edward Hopper, Leonard Baskin, and Jack Levine in his large group portrait, Homage to Thomas Eakins. Although he and Dobbs became close friends and artistic compatriots, their work developed along different directions, and Dobbs, who worked from memory and imagination, employing both literal and symbolic imagery to invoke America’s collective preoccupations and dreams, becoming a figurative painter who balked at the prevailing Abstract Expressionism in favor of Realism and Conceptual Art. His figures were often embedded in an alienating, modern landscape of interwoven cities and suburbs. Dobbs had many solo shows at galleries, universities, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, and the Salon Populiste in Paris. His paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, and the Springfield Museum of Art in Massachusetts. From 1972 to 1996, he was a Professor of Art at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was a member of the National Academy, to which he was elected in 1976. Dobbs died at his home in Greenwich Village on August 9th, 2011.