Paul Feeley

Paul Feeley was born on July 27, 1910, in Des Moines, Iowa. He studied briefly, for a single term, at Menlo Junior College in Menlo Park, California, before moving to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League in the early 1930s under Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Vincent DuMond, George Bridgman, and Cecilia Beaux. No degree from either program is documented.

In 1939 Feeley joined the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont, where he went on to chair the art department through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. His tenure there placed him at the center of a circle of major artists and critics, including Frankenthaler, Noland, Olitski, Pollock, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Clement Greenberg, and Lawrence Alloway, and his teaching influence is regularly cited alongside his own painting.

His painting developed through distinct phases: Abstract Expressionist-inflected work in the mid-1950s, organic figure-ground compositions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and, from 1962 to 1966, the diagrammatic, geometric compositions and shaped canvases for which he is best known. He held solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1954, 1955, and 1958, and at Betty Parsons Gallery from 1960 through 1966, with the Parsons relationship continuing after his death. Feeley died on June 10, 1966, at Memorial Hospital in New York, of leukemia, at the age of 56.

Critics and institutions have treated Feeley as a genuine, if underrecognized, link between Abstract Expressionism and the Color Field and hard-edge abstraction that followed. His inclusion in four canonical mid-1960s museum surveys, Post Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1964, curated by Clement Greenberg), The Shaped Canvas at the Guggenheim (1964), The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art (1965), and Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim (1966, curated by Lawrence Alloway), placed him among the artists credited with defining that critical moment. The Guggenheim mounted a memorial retrospective in 1968, and the Smithsonian Institution published a companion retrospective of his drawings and watercolors the same year. Later reassessments, including a 2002 exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery and a 2014 to 2015 retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, have reinforced his standing.

Feeley's auction record is Carthage, which sold for USD 336,000 at Sotheby's New York, a new high for the artist; the exact sale date has not been independently confirmed. Most of his market sits well below that figure. A 1956 untitled painting brought USD 75,600 as the top lot of a July 2024 Rago Auctions sale, and smaller works, including a 1964 untitled painting sold online at Christie's, have traded for under USD 6,000. Artprice records roughly 72 auction appearances for the artist, indicating a real but modest and inconsistent trading history rather than a deep, liquid market. The Estate of Paul Feeley is represented exclusively by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which has mounted solo exhibitions of his work, most recently in 2025, and functions as the primary point of reference for provenance and authenticity in the absence of a published catalogue raisonne.

Feeley's market is historically important but thin, with roughly seventy documented auction appearances and a price range that runs from a few thousand dollars to a recent record of USD 336,000 for Carthage. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and any authentication question should be directed to Garth Greenan Gallery, the exclusive representative of the artist's estate. Because his record was set only recently and prior results cluster at much lower levels, collectors should treat any single high sale as an early data point in an active rediscovery rather than as an established price floor.