James Howell

James How­ell (1935−2014) was an Amer­i­can abstract artist of unpar­al­leled sub­tle­ty. He used infi­nite vari­a­tions of the colour grey to explore the fun­da­men­tals of light, space, time and kineas­t­het­ic per­cep­tion, exploit­ing the colour’s mys­tery, soft­ness and sim­plic­i­ty. In this com­pre­hen­sive first mono­graph, Alis­tair Rid­er traces Howell’s artis­tic evo­lu­tion, from the begin­nings of his career in the ear­ly 1970s, through to his great­est achieve­ment – the group of abstrac­tions called Series 10, which occu­pied the last two decades of his life. Rid­er also chron­i­cles Howell’s biog­ra­phy, includ­ing his ear­ly stud­ies and accom­plish­ments in archi­tec­ture, and offers sev­er­al inter­pre­ta­tive frame­works for his oeu­vre, notably a con­nec­tion to East Asian philosophies.

‘The dis­tance between noth­ing and more than is nec­es­sary is a lit­tle bit.’
– James Howell

Alis­tair Rid­er is Senior Lec­tur­er inThe School of Art His­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St Andrews. He writes about Euro­pean and North Amer­i­can art from the 1950s to the present day, and has a spe­cial inter­est in abstrac­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly Min­i­mal­ist art. He is the author of Carl Andre: Things in their Ele­ments (2011).