Biography

Thomas Chimes was a Greek-American painter born in Philadelphia to Greek immigrant parents. He entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1939, but his studies were interrupted by World War II when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces. After 1945 he moved to New York, studying philosophy at Columbia University and painting at the Art Students League. Immersed in the city’s modern-art ferment, he experienced a defining jolt in 1946 on encountering Picasso’s Guernica. In 1952 he traveled through Europe—including Greece—and deepened his dialogue with his heritage and with European modernism (not least Matisse). The next year he returned to Philadelphia for good, consciously stepping away from New York’s pressures to build an independent practice fed by memory and literature—above all the subversive thought and fiction of Alfred Jarry, which became a lifelong wellspring.

By the late 1950s Chimes unveiled his first mature paintings: semi-abstract works charged with symbolism and an existential bent. Drawing on his Greek Orthodox upbringing and on European modernism (including the imprint of Matisse’s chapel), he threaded stars, ladders, and crosses into pared-down landscapes as spiritual signs. In the early 1960s he held successful solo shows in New York, drew major collectors, and saw works enter the Museum of Modern Art. Between 1958–1965 he painted the “Crucifixions,” fusing abstract gesture with religious and philosophical motifs to probe spirituality and consciousness. From 1965 to 1973 he shifted to experimental wall-mounted metal boxes—hybrid constructions combining painting, collage, and small objects. Informed by ’Pataphysics (Jarry’s “science of imaginary solutions”), these mixed-media tableaux folded in contemporary cultural icons—from rock figures to Marcel Duchamp—and broadcast his taste for intellectual play and anti-convention.

In the 1970s Chimes reset his studio practice, leaving constructions to return to painting with new formats. From 1973–1978 he produced small portrait panels on wood, set in hand-made frames that evoke Byzantine icons. These intimate “icons” depict his intellectual saints—Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Duchamp, and others—homages to the constellation of ideas animating his work. In the late 1980s he entered his final and most distinctive phase, the “white paintings.” Nearly monochrome canvases—misty, scumbled, sometimes lightly reliefed—veil buried portraits, constellations, and textual fragments. Inscriptions in Greek, French, and English—drawn from alchemical sources and Jarry’s invented universe—turn these austere surfaces into dense fields of thought. Through them he pursued, in elliptical and mysterious fashion, ’Pataphysics and the edges of the psyche, while tapping Greek myth, symbols, and language to the end of his life in 2009.

Although he worked at a remove from the biggest art capitals, Chimes won sustained recognition. The Ringling Museum of Art (Florida) organized his first retrospective in 1968; Moore College of Art (Philadelphia) mounted a survey in 1986. He appeared in major group shows, including the Whitney Biennial (1975) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s tricentennial Three Centuries of American Art (1976). In 1994 the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies (New York) presented a retrospective underscoring the Greek dimensions of his art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics (2007) gathered more than 100 works, and the touring Thomas Chimes: Into the White (2013–2014)—focused on the late white paintings—traveled from Germany to the Benaki Museum in Athens. His works are held by, among others, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MoMA, the National Gallery (Athens), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Chimes’s legacy lies in the rare fusion of the spiritual gravity of Greek heritage with the experimental verve of modern art.

Bibliography

1. Nickel, Karl. Thomas Chimes: A Retrospective Exhibition. Sarasota: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1968.
2. Philadelphia Museum of Art (ed.). Philadelphia: Three Centuries of American Art. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1976.
3. Goldie Paley Gallery. Tom Chimes, A Compendium: 1961–1986. Philadelphia: Moore College of Art & Design, 1986.
4. Taylor, Michael R. Thomas Chimes: Adventures in ’Pataphysics. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Yale University Press, 2007.
5. Ehrmann-Schindlbeck, Anna-Maria et al. Thomas Chimes: Into the White. Tuttlingen / Athens: Galerie der Stadt Tuttlingen & Benaki Museum, 2013.

The biography was written and edited by the Diaspora team.