Last fall, Dr. Lisa Lipiniski’s students in her History of Exhibitions course, curated A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell, exhibiting twenty works on paper by Carroll Sockwell. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and collages, showing both his eccentric usage of mediums and the comfort with experimentation he utilized throughout his life. While the exhibition shows his talent in full range, cohesion still prevails in a style completely unique to Sockwell. Through March 9th, Sockwell’s works will be on display in the Luther W. Brady Gallery as the Corcoran proudly welcomes back an artist who made history in the D.C. art scene and beyond.
In a sea of geometric forms and patterns of abstraction Sockwell picked up from his contemporaries, his work still stands independently. His exploration of abstraction spans across hard-edged and color field works to gestural and emotive pieces that are highly expressive. He exhibited this fearless exploration in 1981 with Untitled Collage (Walter Hopps). Hopps, a former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and renowned museum curator, took Sockwell under his wing and supported his art making throughout the 1970’s. In 1982, Hopps gifted Sockwell with an apartment across from the Washington Cathedral, all Sockwell had to do in return was paint.
This piece is composed of found imagery from magazines and branded paper that have been cut into geometric forms pasted on board. Sockwell also includes collaged pieces with gestural abstractions done in crayon. Among the most striking of the collaged pieces, Sockwell includes Man Ray’s Portrait of Pablo Picasso. As the photograph has been separated into two triangles and pasted one below the other, Picasso’s face is split in half. In doing so, Sockwell not only obscures the image, but transforms Picacco into one of his absurd cubist creations. In Sockwell’s reference, was he playing with the line between abstraction and representation using art history?
Clark Fox, A fellow D.C. painter and friend of Sockwell’s described his work in collage, “that would be about as representational as he would get but basically it’s a framework of abstraction.” Fox describes a time when he and Sockwell were on Canal Street in New York City and were invited to Romare Bearden’s studio, Fox said Sockwell declined the invitation. Despite this, Sockwell’s Untitled Collage (Walter Hopps) brings to mind Bearden’s work in collage throughout the 1970’s, as he collaged images of jazz musicians in harmonic compositions.
Growing up, Sockwell was first captured by music and theater before turning to painting. In a 1999 lecture on Sockwell given by fellow-artist Kevin MacDonald, the D.C.-based artist said, “Carroll himself insists he is as much motivated by music or his own emotions as he is knowledge of past works by modern masters.” While Sockwell’s work might be somewhat referential to other works of art, he still works in a style that is his own. Macdonald uses the analogy of reincarnation to describe what he terms ‘extraction’:
…he sees what has been seized upon and utilized for ones own vision – as ones vision, or turned into a personal form which retains the same soul or voice that can be seen in the masters work. if you believe in reincarnation – the same being coming back again and again in different forms – but the same being.
Sockwell further personalized his gift for Hopps, adding collaged pieces of a brand of French cigarettes that Hopps would have been partial to and including an address in Paris where Hopps would stay.
While it is easy to see chaos in Sockwell’s work as forms, lines and colors fight for our attention, it is just as harmonious when the viewer steps back and embraces the variety of collaged objects as one unified piece. As Sockwell used inspiration broadly from other artists, his exploration with material and process set him apart to pave his own place in history.
By: Maximus Vogt, Art History, ’26.
A Corcoran Homecoming: The Art of Carroll Sockwell is on view in the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery through March 9. The gallery, located within the Corcoran Flagg Building at 500 17th Street, NW, is free and open to the public Wednesday – Saturday, 1-5 pm. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Cecile R. Hunt Fund for American Art and the Director’s Discretionary Fund.