Traditional Forms

Felrath Hines first worked as a Chicago dining car waiter in the early 1940s. Resolved to become an artist, in 1946 he moved to New York. There Hines joined both the Civil Rights Movement and Romare Bearden's Spiral Group of African-American modernists. But, unlike many of his colleagues, he rejected social and political commentary in his art and instead embraced geometric abstraction. Traditional Forms is a series of timeless geometric shapes set within an elegant jigsaw of rectilinear forms. Both his composition and palette are ordered and restrained, creating a coolly intellectual realm of mathematical balance and artistic harmony. To earn a living and support his art, he trained to become a paintings conservator and worked in the 1970s and '80s as the chief conservator for the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1984 he retired and, for the first time in his career, devoted himself fully to his art. Traditional Forms dates from this productive final phase of his artistic career.

2009.4.1c