TitleMonhegan Night
Artist
Reuben Tam
(1916 - 1991)
Date1956
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 34 × 46 in.
Framed: 36 1/2 × 48 1/2 × 1 1/2 in.
SignedSigned at bottom right corner: "Tam 56 ©".
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, Gift of the artist's estate, 1991
Object number1991.51
Label TextOne of the more consistently referential abstract artists, Reuben Tam was born in Kauai, Hawaii and enrolled at the University of Hawaii before continuing his studies at the California School of Fine Arts in 1940. That same year Tam was awarded the First National Prize at the Golden Gate International Exposition for his painting Koto Crater. Soon thereafter he moved to New York where he pursued graduate studies in art history, philosophy, and psychology at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Tam began teaching painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and was a prolific exhibitor in New York City and throughout the country. He would also later hold teaching positions at Queens College and Oregon State University. He first showed with the Downtown Gallery beginning in 1945 and his landscape-inflected abstractions led a critic to presciently write that anyone "Who looks for anything like concrete transcriptions [in Tam's work] is lost. I have a feeling that in time Rueben Tam will make abstract images sharper, more explicit that those now assembled at the Downtown Gallery." In 1948 Tam won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and by the 1950s his painting had grown increasingly abstract. Around this time Tam and his wife began to spend summers on Monhegan Island, Maine and would continue to do so for more than thirty years. He was deeply affected by the landscape, particularly the rugged coasts of his native Hawaii and his adopted summer home of Monhegan. Throughout his life he was also a prolific poet who earned distinction late in life, winning the Elliot Cades Literary Award in 1989. In 1996, a volume of his poetry was published by the University of Hawaii Press. All of Tam's work is imbued with an essence of location and this has led him to write: "For most all of my life as an artist, the one overwhelming factor had been my pursuit of the spirit of place. My work in painting is inseparable from the sources of its subject matter."
"Monhegan Night" was painted during a period of Tam's career when he was working most closely to pure abstraction. The work shows frenetic gestures of Abstract Expressionism within a narrow swath of tonal values in blues and grays that give the painting its enigmatic monochromaticism. Indeed, were it not for the instructive title, the work could be considered entirely absent of representation. Tam first exhibited in the National Academy's annual exhibition of 1947. After the 1950s Tam continued to draw on the inspiration of the landscape and his work became increasingly representational. In 1980 he returned permanently to Kauai, Hawaii. As noted in the press release following his death, Tam's work continued to be "expressive and invariably moving, with an inner spirituality that communicates itself to the viewer."
