The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Peter Busa was an integral member—with Steve Wheeler and Robert Barrell—of a school of American “Indian Space” painting, which gained critical and popular attention just before the triumph of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School. Busa acquired his early training in art and architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Studies at the Art Students League under Thomas Hart Benton during the 1930s led to Busa’s joining the artistic circle of Jackson Pollock, as well as his being unofficially tutored by Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis. Like many of his generation, Busa participated in the mural program of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. In the early 1940s, Busa developed a close relationship with the Chilean-born Surrealist Roberto Matta; they met regularly, along with Pollock, William Baziotes, Gerome Kamrowski, and Robert Motherwell, to experiment with automatic drawing as a means for unleashing the creative potential of the unconscious. Busa settled in the artistic community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the early 1950s, before teaching at New York University, Cooper Union, the Art Students League, the Brooklyn Museum, and the University of Minnesota. While directing the summer program at Southampton College in the early 1970s, he bought an old general store in Southampton and converted it into a summer home and studio. A decade later he bought a house in East Hampton, where he erected a large barn-like studio. He died during the showing of his latest work at the East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art, in the summer of 1985.
[Gregory Galligan]