Charles G. Shaw (1892–1974)

A scion of a wealthy New York family, whose inheritance derived in part from the Woolworth fortune, Charles G. Shaw lived a relatively charmed life before the Depression. After graduating from Yale University (where his classmates included Cole Porter, who remained a life-long friend),  Shaw spent a year at Columbia University’s School of Architecture. Soon afterwards he embarked on a career as a chronicler of the city’s nightlife and its denizens. Writing pithy portraits of figures such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, and Sinclair Lewis for publications such as Vanity Fair, H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set, and The New Yorker, Shaw was equally adept at steering his readers towards the best martini in Manhattan.

As the Roaring Twenties came to an end, Shaw tired of endless socializing and turned to painting, studying in 1928 with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. By 1933 he had begun to develop his notion of the “plastic polygon,” his term for a shaped canvas—probably the first such invention in American painting—which he derived from abstracting the outline of the Manhattan skyline. “Sprouting, so to speak, from the steel and concrete of New York City,” as Shaw put it, his elegant reductions of skyscrapers into parallel rectangles of primary colors and different heights was, for its time, a radical pictorial device that uncannily presaged American Minimalist painting of the 1960s.

Upon seeing Shaw’s work for the first time in 1934, Gallatin was overwhelmed by its singularity and uniquely American aesthetic. A year later he organized an exhibition of Shaw’s work at the Gallery of Living Art, the first solo show held on the premises. Shaw soon became active in the New York art community, both as a member of the Abstract American Artists and, in 1937, as a co-founder of the French-American art journal Plastique. Through this project Shaw became acquainted with the biomorphic relief constructions of Jean Arp—one of his co-editors—which he refashioned into unpainted wooden surrogates. Like Morris and Gallatin, Shaw was a tireless advocate for the cause of American abstraction during the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, eventually resigning from the collections committee of the Museum of Modern Art to protest its refusal to exhibit the work of American modernists.

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Charles G. Shaw, Self-Portrait, ca. 1935
pencil and charcoal on paper, 12 x 9 inches
Collection of Charles Carpenter