Estate of Gregory Gillespie
Gregory Gillespie began at Cooper Union in 1954 - initially to study commercial art but the attraction of painting and fine arts eventually lead him to enroll as a full time student. On the faculty at the time was painter Nicholas Marsicano, who was mostly known for his loose, gestural nudes. Not only a devoted and influential teacher during his forty-plus year tenure at Cooper Union - besides Gillespie, students included Tom Wesselman, Eva Hesse and many others - Marsicano was a deeply involved in the New York art scene, having been an early member of the Club and a regular contributor to publications such as "It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art". While the prevalent attitude at the time was brash, intuitive, painterly and above all, abstract, the progenitors of Abstract Expressionism were in abhorrence of "all fixed systems, ideologies and categories - anything that might curb expressive possibilities," as Irving Sandler noted in 1965. "Extreme individualism was a passionate conviction: 'We agree only to disagree' was the unwritten motto."
From his earliest student days, Gillespie was pulled in the opposite direction; he visited the Frick and Met collections on weekends, studied the paintings of the Italian Renaissance and cultivated the beginnings of a style that would perpetually remain undefinable in the context of his own contemporaries. Gillespie later reminisced about Marsicano's influence as a teacher. “It was the first time I had studied with someone who talked about great ideas. I was primitive and tight in my work; everyone else was loose. Marsicano would find elements of Flemish or Renaissance painting in my work. He seldom talked about style, but about the ideas behind style - how Rubens or Titian composed a painting or why the floors tilted up in Italian painting.”
This image, printed in the 1960 edition of the Cable, the college yearbook, was accompanied by a short essay of Marsicano’s, “The Non-Human Figure,” which elucidates on his approach to figuration - a sensibility that preemptively recalls Gillespie’s own. A meditation on working from life, the essay begins with a description of the speaker’s “Botticelli Woman,” whose “feet never touch the pavement.” Marsicano continues, “As I’m walking down the street babbling to myself, there is always the danger of making sense, and when that occurs I have lost my dream. The non-human figure is a displacement brought so close to the living, but never touching, and when placed upon each other they must fit but never match… If I let you peek into my dream and you extend yourself beyond it, don’t wake me up. History writes your obituary, then sits around like a pallbearer waiting for you to paint it."
Gregory Gillespie in the classroom with professor Nicholas Marsicano at Cooper Union, 1960.
Photo from The Cable, published by Cooper Union, 1960.
Gregory Gillespie began at Cooper Union in 1954 - initially to study commercial art but the attraction of painting and fine arts eventually lead him to enroll as a full time student. On the faculty at the time was painter Nicholas Marsicano, who was mostly known for his loose, gestural nudes. Not only a devoted and influential teacher during his forty-plus year tenure at Cooper Union - besides Gillespie, students included Tom Wesselman, Eva Hesse and many others - Marsicano was a deeply involved in the New York art scene, having been an early member of The Club and a regular contributor to publications such as It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art. While the prevalent attitude at the time was brash, intuitive, painterly and above all, abstract, the progenitors of Abstract Expressionism were in abhorrence of "all fixed systems, ideologies and categories - anything that might curb expressive possibilities," as Irving Sandler noted in 1965. "Extreme individualism was a passionate conviction: 'We agree only to disagree' was the unwritten motto."
From his earliest student days, Gillespie was pulled in the opposite direction; he visited the Frick and Met collections on weekends, studied the paintings of the Italian Renaissance and cultivated the beginnings of a style that would perpetually remain undefinable in the context of his own contemporaries. Gillespie later reminisced about Marsicano's influence as a teacher. “It was the first time I had studied with someone who talked about great ideas. I was primitive and tight in my work; everyone else was loose. Marsicano would find elements of Flemish or Renaissance painting in my work. He seldom talked about style, but about the ideas behind style - how Rubens or Titian composed a painting or why the floors tilted up in Italian painting.”
This image, printed in the 1960 edition of The Cable, the college yearbook, was accompanied by a short essay of Marsicano’s, “The Non-Human Figure,” which elucidates on his approach to figuration - a sensibility that preemptively recalls Gillespie’s own. The essay, a meditation on working from life, begins with a description of the speaker’s “Botticelli Woman,” whose “feet never touch the pavement.” Marsicano continues, “As I’m walking down the street babbling to myself, there is always the danger of making sense, and when that occurs I have lost my dream. The non-human figure is a displacement brought so close to the living, but never touching, and when placed upon each other they must fit but never match… If I let you peek into my dream and you extend yourself beyond it, don’t wake me up. History writes your obituary, then sits around like a pallbearer waiting for you to paint it."