Louis Stone  (1902   -   1984)  Works

Louis Stone

Louis Stone (1902 – 1984)

Louis Stone was born in Findlay, Ohio, in 1902. He attended the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Art in 1923. He then studied under Daniel Garber at Chester Springs during the summer sessions of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Stone also studied at the Art Students League in New York in 1926 and 1927. After leaving the Art Students League, Stone spent the summer in Gloucester painting. While there he met and soon after married, art student Caroline Hoag. With his new wife, Stone traveled to Saint-Tropez, France in 1929, and later to Munich to study with Hans Hoffman. Through 1933, Stone traveled with his wife through Europe and for a time in 1928, rented Cezanne’s studio with Charles Evans. While in France, Stone studied with Andre L’Hote and became friends with Marsden Hartley.

In 1933, the Stones returned to the United States and co-founded, with painter James S. Morris, the Stone-Morris School of Fine Arts in Jacksonville, Florida. The Depression hindered the success of this school and shortly after it began, it ended. In 1935, upon the suggestion of his friend, Charles Evans, Stone moved to Lambertville, New Jersey. In 1938, Stone, Evans and Charles Ramsey offered summer classes in abstract and non-objective painting in New Hope. The three artists created the Ramstonev Cooperative Painting Project while they congregated one night a week in 1938-1939.

Louis Stone is considered one of the most important and sought after of the New Hope Modernists. His work is relatively scarce and is often executed in a small format of either watercolor or gouache. His most prolific period seemed to be from 1936-1945, when he created colorful and appealing abstract compositions. Although, he did paint a body of work in oil and these are seemingly the rarest and most valuable.

Stone exhibited at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, and in 1941 in the Creative Arts Program in Princeton, New Jersey, an exhibition juried by John Marin, Alfred Barr, and Lee Gatch. Stone also exhibited in the American Artist Congress in 1938 at the New Jersey State Museum, the Newark Museum, and in New Hope with the Independents.

Louis Stone died in Lambertville, New Jersey, in 1984.

 

Source: New Hope for American Art by James M. Alterman