A Father’s Art, A Daughter’s Perspective — Bringing Family Ties and a Curator’s Eye to Stephen Greene’s Houston Exhibit

Editor’s note: Alison de Lima Greene, the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, reflects on a deeply personal exhibit in this PaperCity interview. She shares her insights into her father Stephen Greene’s drawings, now on view at Moody Gallery.

When artist Stephen Greene picked up a pencil, he transformed paper into intricate tapestries of behavior. His work, full of sophisticated lines, smudges and amorphous forms invites viewers into a world of artistic storytelling. Each drawing tells its own story, offering a revealing look at his creative process in Stephen Greene: Biographs and Recollections, 1967-1974, on view at Houston’s Moody Gallery through October 26.

Stephen Greene was a significant figure in 20th-century art. He studied under Philip Guston at the University of Iowa and later taught at Princeton University, where one of his notable students was Frank Stella. Greene continued teaching at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, among other places. His work found homes in prestigious institutions like the Tate Gallery in London, MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

Houston audiences became acquainted with Greene’s drawings and paintings in 1989, thanks to the late gallerist Meredith Long.

“He loved being Philip Guston’s student,” his daughter Alison de Lima Greene says. “He loved being Frank Stella’s teacher. More than that, he just loved being their friend.”

A Lifetime of Drawing

In a 1968 interview with Dorothy Seckler, Greene discussed his lifelong passion for drawing.

“I drew very early,” Greene says in the interview. “Before I was even 12, I had an idea of being an artist.”

He carried sketchbooks as a student at Iowa and continued this practice during his travels to Europe in 1949. Later, he described drawing as a “tapestry of behavior” and a vital part of his artistic journey.

The works on display at Moody Gallery reflect this ongoing exploration. Biographs and Recollections, 1967-1974 includes drawings made with gouache, ink and graphite on wove paper and manila-toned mulberry paper. These materials gave his drawings a distinct texture and warmth.

Art critic Barbara Rose, writing in the early 1970s, noted that Greene’s drawings combined “geometric and organic images” with “a lucid spaciousness” that contrasts the mysterious forms often seen in his work.

A Curator and Daughter’s Thoughts

Greene resisted traditional labels like abstract expressionism, social realism and surrealism. He approached art with an open mind, a quality that resonated with his daughter.

“His drawings were meant to be independent from his paintings,” Alison de Lima Greene notes. “He was testing what drawings could be, taking inspiration where he found it.”

Surrealism, for instance, inspired Greene with its looser, dream-like imagery. “He loved Joan Miró’s use of line and his move into abstraction,” de Lima Greene says. In fact, her father references Miró’s iconic oil painting Dog Barking at the Moon (1926) during the 1968 interview.

Existentialism deeply influenced Greene’s work, particularly as he grappled with the aftermath of World War II. De Lima Greene recalls her father’s admiration for Arshile Gorky, whose paintings reflected his family’s escape from Europe.

“He loved Gorky’s paintings, I think because he reflected — in his early works — on his own family’a experience fleeing Europe,” she says. “But also, he loved Gorky’s treatment of line in later works, responding to the urgency of his draftsmanship without necessarily wanting to emulate his aesthetic.”

Greene’s love for art was wide-ranging and drew inspiration from various sources. “Some artists only like the works that look like their own,” de Lima Greene says. “But my father loved all kinds of paintings. He loved Japanese and ancient Assyrian art, Roman mosaics and Baroque paintings.”

His openness to diverse influences extended to younger artists, including Frank Stella, whose influence Greene slyly acknowledged in several of his Biographs series.

For Greene, there was no single narrative or theme. As his daughter turned curator puts it in an essay on her father’s drawings: “These drawings issue an open invitation to viewers to stroll with the artist, to bring their own associations and recollections into play.”

Reflecting on what this particular series of drawings means to her, de Lima Greene adds, “In addition to admiring the sophistication, delicacy and draftsmanship, what I like best is that the drawings invite the viewer in.”

“Stephen Greene: Biographs and Recollections, 1967-1974” is on view at Moody Gallery at 2815 Colquitt Street through Saturday, October 26. Learn more here.