John McLaughlin
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Artist Spotlight
John McLaughlin's Quiet Revolution Still Resonates
There is a particular kind of genius that only reveals itself slowly, and John McLaughlin was perhaps the supreme American example of that truth. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a retrospective survey of his work, audiences encountered something almost paradoxical: paintings of such radical simplicity that they demanded sustained, meditative looking, pulling viewers out of the noise of contemporary life and into a state of profound stillness. That quality has not dimmed with time. If anything, McLaughlin feels more essential now than ever, a painter whose devotion to pure… Continue reading
Artists in conversation
Karl Benjamin
Benjamin was a fellow California Hard-edge painter whose geometric compositions share McLaughlin's commitment to precise forms, flat color fields, and a meditative visual clarity rooted in West Coast abstraction.
Lorser Feitelson
Feitelson was a central figure in the Los Angeles Hard-edge movement alongside McLaughlin, producing similarly crisp geometric paintings that emphasized clarity of form and carefully balanced color relationships.
Ad Reinhardt
Reinhardt shared McLaughlin's philosophical commitment to reduction and contemplative stillness in painting, pursuing geometric abstraction stripped of expressionist gesture and oriented toward near monochromatic quietude.
Artists who inspired them
Kazimir Malevich
Malevich's Suprematist reduction of painting to pure geometric form and his rejection of representational content provided a foundational precedent for McLaughlin's own pursuit of absolute abstraction through simple rectangular shapes.
Piet Mondrian
Mondrian's rigorous geometric order and his belief that abstract painting could express universal spiritual harmony deeply resonated with McLaughlin's own search for balance and transcendence through pure form and color.