Paul Feeley is one of the most gifted and influential art professors to have taught at Bennington College in its 75 year history. Beginning in 1939, he remained at the college, with the exception of a leave of absence during World War II, as a beloved artist and teacher until his untimely death in 1966. The work in this exhibition, created late in his career, between 1958 and 1966, has a coherent and easily recognizable visual vocabulary. Feeley made a name for himself with paintings and sculptures such as these, marked by their limited palette of vibrant colors and symmetrical, abstract forms. Despite the stylistic cohesion of these works, Feeley's career was marked by continual exploration and experimentation. From figural, WPA-style murals in the 1930s to experimentation with Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Feeley was constantly striving to find his own voice and address the relationship between art and life. It was this openness and continual pursuit of answers that not only lead to his success as an artist, but also made him a gifted teacher..

Feeley is often spoken of in conjunction with other artists who had ties to Bennington College, such as Helen Frankenthaler, who studied under Feeley in the late 1940s, and his colleagues who taught at the college and worked in the Bennington area, including Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro. Feeley worked closely with these figures and his paintings and sculptures share some of the characteristics of their work, such as the use of raw, unprimed canvas, brilliant fields of color, and abstract forms. Yet Feeley's work from the late 1950s until his death in 1966 is distinctively his own. It brings together threads from many of the various “schools” that dominated American art during that era, including Color Field painting, Minimalism, Pop art, and even a hint of Conceptual art. It was his ability to soak in all these disparate ideas and make sense of them in his own, unique way that made him both a great artist, really a keystone of High Modernism, and a beloved teacher.