Artist Joseph D. Downing, 82, dies

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Artist Joseph D. Downing, 82, dies
Museum of his work set for Bowling Green
By Paula Burba
pburba@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal

Joseph Dudley Downing, a Kentucky native who became an expatriate artist in France -- never returning for more than brief visits -- has died at the age of 82.

Downing died Saturday in Menerbes, a village in the Provence region of France where he'd lived more than half a century. He also maintained an apartment and studio in Paris.

The cause of his death was not immediately available yesterday, although it was believed to be natural causes, according to friends and the funeral home handling arrangements.

"He's one of Kentucky's major lights in contemporary arts," Owensboro Museum of Fine Art director Mary Bryan Hood said yesterday. "In time, he will be recognized as a major influence in European art, but also certainly a major American artist."

She had talked to Downing in recent weeks as he planned to return to the United States for the spring opening of the Joseph Dudley Downing Museum in Bowling Green.

"I'm still in a state of shock," said Bowling Green businessman Jerry Baker, a collector who has organized and built the museum to exclusively house his collection of about 1,000 of Downing's works.

Yesterday Baker received a letter from Downing about his art, as well as information about a new book he had written.

"I do know we need to go on with the opening," Baker said. "I guess it will be more of a dedication than an opening. … And a memorial to his life."

The Owensboro museum commissioned Downing to do the principal works for its 1993 expansion. Six of his paintings and an obelisk are now featured in the postmodern atrium, Hood said, all done on cowhide.

Revered for his abstraction and experimentation with different formats, Downing had created oil paintings on terra cotta roof tiles, linen bed sheets and rustic barn doors.

"He has a lot of original work, things that nobody else has ever done," said Baker, who met Downing in 1992.

Downing commonly did not date his works, and exhibits where hung with no regard to chronology -- reflecting his focus on places and states of being over time, according to one art critic.

"I have always thought that my work has been a daily dreaming of the dream that living has been," Downing once told a French critic.

Born in Tompkinsville, Downing grew up on a tobacco farm in Horse Cave. As a child, he explored the caves of the region, which he often cited as an influence on his style.

After graduating from Horse Cave High School, he served in the Army during World War II. Returning home, he enrolled at Western Kentucky University and studied art. A neighbor suggested Downing try optometry and offered to share a practice.

Downing earned his optometry degree in 1950 from the Northern Illinois College of Optometry in Chicago, where he met writers, artists and actors who inspired him to take classes at the Chicago Art Institute.

"Gradually, bit by bit, the painting devoured the optometry," Downing said, "and I knew I would never fit glasses."

His first major one-man show in America was in 1962, at the old Art Center in Louisville. By then, he'd already had 10 one-man shows in Europe.

Working as clerk at a law firm during his first decade or so in Paris, Downing invented the art form known as stapleage -- collages made from office supplies and assembled with staples.

Downing has works in the Louvre (Museum) in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Seattle and Cincinnati Art museums and the Speed Art Museum, as well as numerous other museums in Europe. His art has also been exhibited in Canada and Mexico.

Downing's critical success has often been traced to 1952, when Pablo Picasso visited one of the earliest displays of Downing's work and pronounced it "Well done."

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I was able to talk to Dudley in 2000 during his exhibition at the Kentucky Museum. We enjoyed sharing stories about odd surfaces that we had both painted on and how art found us. It was really great fun talking to him.

Last year, I was able to assist a family in selling several of Mr. Downings' works. This was a great honor. All of the works remain in collections in Kentucky.

Lastly, I was looking forward to the new museum and the exhibition in the spring with great anticipation. I am still in shock, but hopeful that all will go forward.