Ben Wilson was an American artist known for his early, expressionistic paintings from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s and his subsequent non-objective paintings, a personal synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and Constructivism. He is generally considered a second-generation Abstract Expressionist.
In spite of his predominately academic training, Wilson was particularly attracted to Analytic Cubism and experimented with elements of abstraction even in his earliest figurative work. Following his formal art education, he shared a studio in Chelsea with several of his CCNY classmates and worked for the WPA as an art instructor. By the late 1930s through the 40s an expressionistic style and social content dominated his painting. Strongly identifying with the plight of the persecuted in Europe, Wilson explored themes of war, torment, and futility, attempting to convey "the grief of the intolerable." One of the youngest artists to show at the A.C.A. Gallery in 1940 and with the Bombshell Group at the Riverside Museum in 1942, he had his first one-man show in 1946 at the Gallery Neuf. His work—expressionistically rendered Biblical parables more closely akin to the German Expressionists than to the prevailing social realists—was much admired by the critics for its sincerity and vehement social protest. Art criticHoward Devree wrote in the New York Times, "If there has been more earnest and emotional painting shown this season than the somber canvases by Ben Wilson at Galerie Neuf, it has escaped my attention." When times improved and social pressures subsided, Wilson's mood lifted. Along with his sculptor wife Evelyn Wilson and daughter Joanne, he spent 1950–52 in Paris, where he worked at the Academie Julien. During this time his involvement with imagery persisted. While he remained concerned with his sense of universal injustice, his work took a turn towards the psychological and mythic. He was represented in the ’50s by the Harry Salpeter Gallery in Manhattan. By 1960, influenced by the Russian Constructivists, Mondrian, and Abstract Expressionism, Wilson had fully embraced abstraction. Searching for what he called "a scaffolding under the externals", he struggled to develop his unique personal vocabulary and structure, a fusion of the cerebral and the emotive. In time he became increasingly experimental, incorporating unorthodox materials; working his paintings from all directions; and dripping, spraying, stenciling and collaging. While continuing to explore unusual color harmonics, compositional variations increasingly became his major focus. Employing disjunctions, repeated and interlocking motifs, linear networks, and complex overlays, he worked to create a sense of transparency through a multilayered development of space. Through the years Wilson pursued similar investigations in notebook after notebook of drawings. A dedicated teacher, for five decades Wilson taught painting in his various studios in Manhattan and later New Jersey, and lectured to museum- and gallery-visiting classes for Brandeis University and NYU. He was also active in artist groups such as MAG. and Vectors. Widely exhibited, with more than 30 solo exhibitions, Wilson is cited in Who's Who in Art, Who's Who in the East, the Dictionary of International Biography and American Artists of Renown. As well as in private collections, his work is represented in numerous museum and university collections . Montclair State University, in Montclair, New Jersey, permanently houses his art estate and papers. A portion of his papers is also included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
