(1929-1982)
Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of California, Berkeley. After moving to New York City in the early 1950s, he became friends with Fairfield Porter and Frank O’Hara and assumed his part in the New York School of painters and poets.
Amidst the frenzy of Abstract Expressionism, Button remained true to his interest in realism, and is now most commonly associated with such New York School artists including again Fairfield Porter, along with Jane Freilicher and Alex Katz, among others. Concerning Button, Bill Berkson has written: “The scaled-up perceptual intimacy his best paintings assert is part of what the realist wing of the New York School developed, beginning in the ‘50s, as a counterthrust to—as well as an absorption of—abstraction’s headlong specifyings of applied paint.”
