William Harrington (Chicago, Illinois June 20, 1942 - Holliston, Massachusetts July 17, 2020)
About
William C. Harrington was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1942. He was raised in an Irish-Italian family and lived in the city's working-class neighborhood. Harrington was a star defensive end on his high school football team but also possessed drawing skills that gained him attention. William Harrington was the first person in his family to make art of any kind. He studied in the sculpture department at The University of Illinois and did graduate work at The University of Hartford. Harrington spent summers assisting sculptor George Rickey and helped fabricate his "useless machines." After graduating with an MFA in sculpture in 1965, Harrington was drafted into the US Army and entered Officers Candidate School. Upon completing his training and as a second lieutenant, he was assigned to army logistics in Worms, Germany. Then Vietnam for two years.
William Harrington was the leader of Vietnam Combat Artists Team VII from 1967 to 1969; one of six artists assigned to make paintings about the war, often from the front lines. These young artists accompanied infantry patrols on reconnaissance missions while trampling through rice paddies, swamps, and jungle. They were free to roam the war zone, equipped with sketchbooks, paints, watercolors, pencils, and Eastman Kodak 127 brownie instamatics. They were granted tremendous artistic license and two instructions: be expressive and stay busy. Combat Artists date back in history, obviously daring because their task was daunting. The American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was a "special artist" of the Civil War; he traveled and lived with soldiers executing artworks as a "news correspondent." During the Second World War, British artists Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, and Stanley Spencer shared a similar distinction. US Combat Artists, in wars as recently as in Iraq and Afghanistan, rallied to the refrain: “Go to war, do art.”
After the war, Harrington and his wife Diana retreated to Virginia and built a cabin on Bent Mountain; he was haunted and traumatized by the war for the next fifty-one years. His artwork attests to it. At his core was a chronic earnestness with an unyielding baseline: heavy industry. His intensity, hands-on dedication, and work ethic stand apart at the edges of the art world universe.
While Harrington’s paintings and sculptures sometimes comprise of caustic cracks about Kissinger, Nixon, Trump, and an entire crop of "nitwits," these visual concoctions read more like phantasmagorias of loss and skepticism, hauled up from a reservoir of disillusionment. Harrington, like Jackson Pollock, hoards his pain. But unlike Pollock, he modulates his inner life sufficiently to remain focused and relevant, while the latter drove off the road a few miles from where I am writing now, decapitated by a tree. Harrington headbutts his way through work ranging from assembled junkyard scrap, wooden totems, and wall-hangings (much of this work is undated). His artifacts often depict failed American foreign policy, the cruel fiascos of my lifetime, but their dominion lies elsewhere. Harrington remains engrossed by unimaginable grief and anger as he applies his lens to another world and place: redemption. Harrington copes with significant loss, driven by a need to relieve his pain and grasp at a command over his fears and isolation from society. He writes that he intends to "live deliberately."
Harrington was teaching art in the 1970s and '80s: at Indiana State University and later at Iowa State. Later, he settled in Holliston, Massachusetts, where he worked for the next thirty years until his death. Working until his very last days, Harrington was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018 and died on July 19, 2020, at home with his wife Diana by his side.
William Harrington was the leader of Vietnam Combat Artists Team VII from 1967 to 1969; one of six artists assigned to make paintings about the war, often from the front lines. These young artists accompanied infantry patrols on reconnaissance missions while trampling through rice paddies, swamps, and jungle. They were free to roam the war zone, equipped with sketchbooks, paints, watercolors, pencils, and Eastman Kodak 127 brownie instamatics. They were granted tremendous artistic license and two instructions: be expressive and stay busy. Combat Artists date back in history, obviously daring because their task was daunting. The American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was a "special artist" of the Civil War; he traveled and lived with soldiers executing artworks as a "news correspondent." During the Second World War, British artists Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, and Stanley Spencer shared a similar distinction. US Combat Artists, in wars as recently as in Iraq and Afghanistan, rallied to the refrain: “Go to war, do art.”
After the war, Harrington and his wife Diana retreated to Virginia and built a cabin on Bent Mountain; he was haunted and traumatized by the war for the next fifty-one years. His artwork attests to it. At his core was a chronic earnestness with an unyielding baseline: heavy industry. His intensity, hands-on dedication, and work ethic stand apart at the edges of the art world universe.
While Harrington’s paintings and sculptures sometimes comprise of caustic cracks about Kissinger, Nixon, Trump, and an entire crop of "nitwits," these visual concoctions read more like phantasmagorias of loss and skepticism, hauled up from a reservoir of disillusionment. Harrington, like Jackson Pollock, hoards his pain. But unlike Pollock, he modulates his inner life sufficiently to remain focused and relevant, while the latter drove off the road a few miles from where I am writing now, decapitated by a tree. Harrington headbutts his way through work ranging from assembled junkyard scrap, wooden totems, and wall-hangings (much of this work is undated). His artifacts often depict failed American foreign policy, the cruel fiascos of my lifetime, but their dominion lies elsewhere. Harrington remains engrossed by unimaginable grief and anger as he applies his lens to another world and place: redemption. Harrington copes with significant loss, driven by a need to relieve his pain and grasp at a command over his fears and isolation from society. He writes that he intends to "live deliberately."
Harrington was teaching art in the 1970s and '80s: at Indiana State University and later at Iowa State. Later, he settled in Holliston, Massachusetts, where he worked for the next thirty years until his death. Working until his very last days, Harrington was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018 and died on July 19, 2020, at home with his wife Diana by his side.
Exhibition
Harrington rarely exhibited his artwork aside from an occasional show in a local gallery and left behind five decades of work with numerous notes and writings on art.