John Grillo was a seminal figure in postwar American abstraction whose career bridged both coasts and several generations of modernism. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1917 to Sicilian immigrant parents, Grillo showed an early interest in art inspired by his father, who painted and sculpted. After his family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, he studied at the Hartford School of Fine Arts, painting portraits and scenes of working-class life under the influence of the Ashcan painters and the social realism of Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh.
Following his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Grillo’s exposure to a reproduction of Robert Motherwell’s Pancho Villa sparked his transition toward abstraction. He enrolled at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts under the G.I. Bill in 1946, quickly becoming known for his energetic, improvised use of color and material. His early abstractions—made with limited resources using coffee grounds, cocoa, and washes—were among the first expressions of West Coast Abstract Expressionism. As critic Thomas Albright later noted, “Grillo was perhaps the first and purest ‘action painter’ on the West Coast.”
In 1948, Grillo moved to New York to study with Hans Hofmann, whose theories of spatial tension and color resonance had a lasting impact on his work. Exhibiting at the Artist’s Gallery, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, and the Tanager Gallery, he became part of the downtown artist-run circle that included Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Grillo produced an extraordinary body of work that merged Hofmann’s chromatic discipline with his own exuberant sensibility. His collages from this era—made from fragments of paper, fabric, and printed matter—served as studies for his later monumental canvases. By the early 1960s, his paintings had evolved into radiant, large-scale compositions dominated by yellow and gold. Critics compared their luminosity to Turner and Venetian painting; Dore Ashton wrote in The New York Times that Grillo’s paintings “seem to reach for the heavens… an attempt to render the impossible.”
In later decades, Grillo continued to innovate, exploring geometric abstraction, sculpture, printmaking, and themes drawn from mythology, dance, and music. He taught for over two decades at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, inspiring generations of artists, and continued painting daily until his passing in 2014.
Grillo’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. His lifelong pursuit of color, light, and movement remains one of the most distinctive contributions to postwar American art.