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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
March/April 2022 59
D
uring the American Depression, the Golden Age of Comics,
Arthur Pinajian fashioned comic strips with strips such as
‘Hooded Justice’, ‘Invisible Justice’, ‘Madam Fatal’ and
‘Reynolds of the Mounted’. In the 1950s he worked on Western
stories for Atlas/Marvel. The while he drew and painted
landscapes and figures in an abstract Expressionism in obscurity. He
eschewed public approbation in-the 1950s and 1960s when the New York
Art world was Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, and Rothko – largely holed up in
Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1959 Guggenheim Museum. As a result, 50 years of
extraordinary abstract landscapes and figurative paintings were found in
the garage and attic of the house he lived in with his sister on Long Island
outside New York when he died aged 85 in 1999. His disputed instructions
for the works to be taken to the town dump in Bellport were thwarted in a
Arthur Pinajian:
number 7 after
Da Vinci
By Tony Lowes
CULTURE
last-minute 2008 reprieve when the buyer of the cottage investigated the
bundles of paintings and brought them to the attention of the art world. In
2013, ABC’s ‘Good Morning America’ featured the Pinajian discovery of
thousands of paintings “rescued from a Dumpster” as “the unlikely discovery
that has rocked the art world”. In August 2015 the discovery of his work was
ranked among the ten biggest accidental art discoveries of all time, falling
in at Number Seven, after Goya, Da Vinci and Renoir. A master of structural
colour, his works reflects the soul of a flawed, yet brilliant, artistic genius.
They fire us up.
Erly work: comicstrip
