Robert Cronin: Restless Artist

Robert Cronin is a restless artist. Over his long career, the muses have provided different inspirations that he expressed in different media—careful works, edited and refined before reaching their final formulations. But now in his 80s, the artist has cast aside such restraints and is working with pure spontaneity.

“About four years ago, just before falling asleep at night, I found myself doing small line drawings in pencil,” he explained. “They were like little prayers, done in five or 10 minutes. Lying on my side, with the day's cares and thoughts falling away, I was experiencing a freedom in drawing unlike at any other time.”

The drawings spring spontaneously from his subconscious. “The day is done and these are just intuitive—they just come out with no preconception,” he related.

Not all are created equal, of course but if they still appeal to the artist in the cold light of day they may be translated, without correction, to the canvas. “I might do 10 drawings, out of which there might be one I would consider painting,” he said.

“A figure might start as just a line that suggests the bend of a wrist and would simply go from there into whatever figure wished to be discovered from this. Sometimes it is only one continuous line. Once it gets to the canvas, then it’s color variations and values.”

Cronin, whose obsession over the 55-years of his career has been color and placement, does not claim any messages behind the images. Indeed sometimes there is a subtle, wry humor in their titles. One painting, dating from 2019, shows a portly conductor, head bowed over his floppy bowtie in concentration, baton raised. It is titled Local Bosnian Conductor. “Of course, there are no local Bosnian conductors,” he observed.

These recent paintings will be exhibited March 18 through May 6 at the D.M. Hunt Library in Falls Village. There is an opening reception April 2, 3-5 PM.

“I have no idea where these images come from,” he said. “It could have been the movement of an arm I saw in a Katherine Hepburn movie years ago that just lay in the back of my mind. This is very unlike anything I have done before but I like it when I arrive at something with the potential of talking to me.”

Cronin, who lists Henri Matisse as among his influences, has spent most of his career exploring abstract art, both in multicolored sculptures, on canvas and paper. But this is not the first time he has delved into figural painting. When he moved to the Northwest Corner in the 1990s, his attention shifted to paintings of two or more figures engaged in often enigmatic pursuits, leaving it to the viewer to make his or her own interpretation.

“(Those) preliminary linear drawings, although also starting from nothing, were endlessly revised for better decisions of gesture or placement or interactions before painting started,” he recalled. “They were developed through additions and subtractions, lots of editing. But it was a lot like juggling—how many times do you want to juggle before it becomes repetitive?”

Cronin says his abstract works—yes, he is moving back in that direction—are created using acrylics while his figurative paintings are done in oils because that medium allows better interpretation of skin tones. But his earliest love was sculpture and he enjoyed a long period of success in that realm.

“It was in 1980 that I left studio teaching at the School of the Worcester Art Museum and moved to Manhattan for a fulltime commitment to my work,” he recalled. “I was 43 and (as a career move), it might have been too late but my commitment to my new polychrome tinplate and wire sculptures was very strong and the response was good.”

Four pieces were shown in a 1981 summer show at Marlborough Gallery and shortly thereafter he became represented by the Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer Gallery with four shows there in the 1980s. With their help, he also had exhibitions in London, Hamburg, Zurich, Tokyo, Osaka, Toronto and Montreal.

This early flowering recently had a new blossoming. Cronin, who had a cache of his sculpture stored in his basement, was approached by a young gallery owner in Toronto about having a show there. “I am in my 80s and I didn’t want to load up a vehicle with my sculpture and drive to Toronto so I invited him here,” he said. “He came and loved my stuff and bought all my sculptures. So my early work is well represented in Toronto!”

Cronin said he was never particularly strong in marketing his work, a process that occupies the time of many artists. “I do my shows at the library every two or three years and that is enough,” he said.

Despite his low-key approach to his art, he has enjoyed considerable success, with works in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Academy Museum in New York, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Cronin received his degrees at RISD and Cornell University and has taught at Bennington College and Brown University. The artist’s webpage is robertcroninart.com. The full exhibition of Robert Cronin’s paintings at the Hunt Library can also be seen virtually at huntlibrary.org beginning on March 18 where works can be reserved for purchase.

The library is located at 63 Main Street, Falls Village; 860-824-7424. Hours: Tuesday and Thursday, 10 AM-5 PM, Friday, 3-7 PM, Saturday, 10 AM-1 PM.