Artist’s Musings
Select Exhibitions
Art Sales & Research, 2022
Drawings from the early 1970s by John Tweddle are on view.
Bonnefanten Museum, 2009
During Pop art’s heyday in the 1960s, a small headstrong group presented themselves as artists’ artists rather than media darlings. Renegade works by nine artists demonstrate this thesis for the European exhibition, Exile on Main Street.
About the Artist
Artist John Tweddle (1938-2022), a.k.a. Kentucky John, is considered by many to be an outsider artist. He’s exhibited at institutions such as MoMA P.S.1, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. His work is in the permanent collections of several museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Museum Collections
John Tweddle’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Bonnefanten Museum in The Netherlands and others.
Selected Reviews & Commentary
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
Tweddle’s Vision from Oklahoma alludes to the environmental crisis in the border of the painting. - Artforum, 2014: Art (Truck)
In Art (Truck), 1970, for example, a central black form in the shape of a flower is pollinated with lots of yellow dollar signs and a truck labeled with “Art” belches exhaust at the painting’s core. - Artforum, 2014
Tweddle’s furious struggle against the commodity status of art (against capitalism) resonates with extreme clarity and graphic vividness. - Interview with Artist John Tweddle
John Tweddle. Bohemian cowboy from Santa Fe. Cult figure of American painting. As befits an artist, this status can also be stolen from him. Tweddle (1938) has absolutely no message whatsoever for the so-called art scene; in the early seventies he turned his back on the world for good - About John Tweddle
Tweddle is visually slicing life from a place where “art” has not yet fanned out and differentiated itself from billions of other possible levels of awareness. This is Quantum stuff! - Bittersweet Views of Americana
Despite years of working within the system of the art world, Tweddle has retained a kind of innocence that is rare. Tweddle is not a primitive, since he has crossed the barriers into the currents of contemporary art and is educated and aware of the concerns of artists today. But he is a man who has retained his romantic ties to his humble beginnings. - Treasures from the Met
Tweddle’s unhappy allegory is painted with good humor. But even his cartoon imagery cannot dispel the narrative’s apocalyptic import. - New York Times, 1983 Grace Glueck Review
For all our suspicions of naivete in art, this work is utterly disarming. What holds it all together is that Mr. Tweddle really knows how to paint.
