(b Canandaigua, NY, 2 Aug 1880; d Long Island, NY, 23 Nov 1946). American painter. He worked as an illustrator in New York (1903-7). In 1907 he travelled to Paris and southern France, where under the influence of Henri Matisse and Paul C?zanne he experimented with a style characterized by bright colours, curvilinear rhythms and non-naturalistic representation. On his return to the USA in 1909, his association with Alfred Stieglitz began. In 1910 he moved to a farm in Westport, CT. At this time he created some of the first distinctively non-representational works produced by an American, for example the Abstractions series (all priv. cols, see Morgan, pp. 100-103). The ten pastels that he showed in his first one-man exhibition at the 291 Gallery (1912) consisted of simplified, stylized motifs, the circular and saw-tooth forms of which interpenetrated and overlapped to create an organic Futurism. In them he expressed his belief that objects are not discrete, isolated entities, but active forces whose rhythms are in constant interplay with their environments.

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