Charles Green Shaw (1892-1974) Oil on Panel “Yellow Sun”, signed lower right Shaw with Bertha Schafer label on verso.
16 in. x 20 in. Overall 25 ½ in. x 29 ½ in.

Charles Green Shaw was born in 1892 in New York City. He studied at Yale University, at the Columbia University School of Architecture, and at the Art Students League of New York. He then studied under the Ashcan School painter George Luks and under the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. An heir to the Woolworth empire, Shaw was known as a socialite and a man about town, and in the twenties, he chronicled the café society that he frequented in the social pages of The New Yorker, The Smart Set and Vanity Fair. Shaw became serious about painting when he took a trip to Paris in 1929 to see Albert E. Gallatin and George L.K. Morris and spent the next four years perfecting a style that would incorporate cubist, fauve and de Stijl elements.

In the 1940s Shaw began painting monochromatic planes of intersecting color. Although he used familiar shapes, such as rectangles, triangles, circles and grids in Yellow Sun the shapes take on a more representative function. The yellow orb in the top right corner of the painting suggests the sun, and the two-toned shape below it looks like a fish. Although the forms are, again, geometric shapes in primary colors, the composition suggests something of a landscape. Although the painting as a whole is abstract, the symbols are not. As Shaw laid out a three-dimensional plane of bright, geometric shapes he peppered it with familiar objects that begin to tell a story. In this article “A Word to the Objector,” Shaw displays his profound commitment to his belief that abstract painting was “an appeal to one’s …aesthetic emotion along… (rather than) to those vastly more familiar emotions which are a mixture of sentimentality, prettiness, anecdote, and melodrama.”

Shaw exhibited his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and at the Corcoran Gallery Biennial. His works can be seen in the collections of the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

1 John R. Lane and Susan C. Larsen, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in American (New York: Abrams, 1983), 26.