{{Short description|American painter}} {{Infobox person | name = Carroll Sockwell | birth_date = {{Birth date|1943|02|13}} | birth_place = Washington, D.C., U.S. | death_date = {{Death date and age|1992|07|09|1943|02|13}} | death_place = Washington, D.C., U.S. | education = Corcoran School of Art | occupation = artist | spouse = | known_for = painting, drawings, sculptures }} '''Carroll Sockwell''' (1943–1992) was an American artist whose nonrepresentational drawings, paintings, and assemblages drew upon both classical modernist and minimalist traditions and showed an ability to integrate geometric with gestural abstraction. He was known for his ability to introduce nuances of color and emphasis in bare and simple pictorial themes.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/>
Difficult to label, his work was seen as paradoxical: "elegant and anguished, somber and yet playful, rigorous yet free."<ref name="Washington Post May 1983" /> Throughout his career, he faced challenges that were beyond his control and seemed, as one observer said, to be "an artist who by birth, temperament and timing started out carrying a heavy load."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub" /> Nonetheless, he also seemed to be his own worst enemy, disregarding the necessity of earning a living and alienating those who tried to help him.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992" />
==Early life and education== {{Quote box | title = | quote = "Smudged, enigmatic calligraphic scrawls whisper across a row of five white rectangles. Jewel-like reds and blues glint through crisscross forests of shiny black crayon. A perfectly twisted curve of scrap metal has the power to rivet one to the spot. So few artists today are truly masters of their media. Even fewer appreciate the purely aesthetic value of line, color and composition. So when one has occasion to see an entire exhibition of works by an artist of the caliber of Carroll Sockwell, it comes as a revelation. Here is a craftsman who has never for a moment doubted the poetry, or the passion, that nonobjective abstraction is capable of expressing, and who has talent, sensitivity and vision enough to make it so." | source = ''Washington Post'' critic, Michael Welzenbach, reviewing a retrospective solo exhibition in June 1992<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/> | align = left | width = 22em | border = 0px | bgcolor = #BCD4E6 | quoted = 1 }} Carroll Sockwell was born on February 13, 1943, in Washington, D.C. and grew up in a household headed by his maternal grandmother.<ref name="SSDI Sockwell"/><ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/> His mother worked as a maid and his father sometimes worked as a laborer and sometimes served in the armed forces.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/><ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/> His grandmother was also a maid. In addition to these relatives, an aunt, an uncle, and four brothers also lived in the home.<ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/> With his father infrequently present, his mother had charge of his upbringing until, in 1948, she began a 15-year period of hospitalization for schizophrenia. On her departure, his aunt became his caregiver.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/>
Sockwell attended public schools in the District and, while still a pupil, was himself committed to the same psychiatric hospital as the one where his mother was a patient.<ref name="Washington Post Jan 1971"/> With support from social workers, Sockwell became interested first in music, then in theater, and finally in painting as possible careers.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> In 1957, at the age of 14, he entered the Corcoran School of Art. The following year, he won a prize for a work he created there.{{refn|group=note|""student,"<ref name="MacDonald Lecture"/> "prize"<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> }}
During the time he was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment at St. Elizabeth's, Sockwell met Elinor Ulman, a foundational figure in the field of art therapy.{{refn|group=note|"treatment,"<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> "ambitious,"<ref name="Ulman Bio Brown"/> "art"<ref name="Art Therapy Ulman"/> }} She became a mentor, introducing him to the principal D.C. art galleries and museums and encouraging his artistic ambitions.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> In 1959, at the age of 17, Sockwell left his family home. He moved to Manhattan where he found work at Bonwit Teller and met important abstract expressionist artists, such as Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning, primarily by visiting bars that they frequented, such as the famous Cedar Bar.<ref name="MacDonald Lecture"/> Failing to find a foothold in the New York art scene, he returned to Washington D.C. in 1963. Of that four-year period, he later said "I was almost the only black. It was hard to be accepted."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/>
Back in Washington he lived hand to mouth for a time. In 1965 he began a three-year stint as curator in the city's non-profit African-American gallery, Barnett-Aden.<ref name="MacDonald Lecture"/> In 1968 or soon after, Sockwell became acquainted with Walter Hopps, James Harithas, and Harry Lunn, each of whom began to influence, support, and sustain his work. Hopps was then director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art which, in 1968, was absorbed by the Corcoran Gallery. Harithas was then director of that gallery and Harry Lunn had just opened a commercial gallery in Washington.{{refn|group=note|"Hopps,"<ref name="Washington Gallery of Modern Art AAA"/> "Lunn," <ref name="Harry Lunn The Independent"/> "Harithas"<ref name="MacDonald Lecture"/> }}
==Career in art==
In 1958, then aged 15, Sockwell was awarded a prize for his painting, "Bridge With the Sun."<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> In 1966 he exhibited in a group show held at the Tarot Gallery in Manhattan.<ref name="artnet bio"/> Two years later his work appeared beside works by Michael Clark, Robert Newman, and Kenneth Wade in an exhibition of hard-edge art at the Corcoran Gallery.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1968"/> He showed the following year in an NAACP-sponsored group exhibition held at the Nordness Gallery in Manhattan. Other exhibitors included Norman Lewis, Charles McGee, Felrath Hines, Alma W. Thomas, Walter Williams.<ref name="Crisis 1969"/> At the same time his work appeared in a group of seventeen artists at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota and at about this time he showed at the Margaret Dickey Gallery in the District.{{refn|group=note|"seventeen,"<ref name="Ringling 1969"/> "Ringling,"<ref name="MacDonald Lecture"/> "Dickey"<ref name="Washington Post Jan 1971"/> }} In 1971 a solo exhibition at the Jefferson Place Gallery called "Mirror Compositions" drew favorable criticism in both the ''Washington Post'' and ''Jet'' magazine.<ref name="Washington Post Jan 1971"/><ref name="Jet Mar 1971"/> Another solo, this at the Corcoran, followed in 1974 and in the same year his work appeared in group shows at the Whitney and Brooklyn Museums.<ref name="Russell bio"/> That year he also executed a commission for a 40-foot-long mural for the psychiatric ward of D.C. General Hospital.{{refn|group=note|"mural,"<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/> "psychiatric ward"<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> }} He subsequently showed in Washington commercial spaces, including the Middendorf, Fraser, and Fiedler galleries.{{refn|group=note|"Middendorf,"<ref name="artnet bio"/> "Fraser,"<ref name="Washington Post Mar 1978"/> "Fiedler"<ref name="Russell bio"/> }} {{Quote box | title = | quote = "In an era of loud, large and too often bombastic imagery, Sockwell's [work] has far more in common with the intimate visual poesy of Paul Klee's or Wassily Kandinsky's, of an earlier, more severely intellectual period." | source = Michael Welzenbach in the ''Washington Post'', June 13, 1992<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/> | align = right | width = 22em | border = 0px | bgcolor = #BCD4E6 | quoted = 1 }} {{Quote box | title = | quote = "I am interested in composition, line, the intellectual side of art. I'm not really interested in the prettiness but rather the strength of art. I want my art to be my own personal statement." | source = Carroll Sockwell in an interview by ''Washington Post'' reporter Judith Weinraub, June 13, 1992<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> | align = left | width = 22em | border = 0px | bgcolor = #BCD4E6 | quoted = 1 }} Sockwell continued to show during the rest of the 1980s and first two years of the 1990s, but toward the end of this time he suffered periods when despite the assurance of high-priced sales he was unable to work and in the months leading up to his death in July 1992 he squandered the comfortable living that had been provided for him and returned to the destitute state of his early years as an artist.{{refn|group=note|"continued to show,"<ref name="artnet bio"/> "comfortable living,"<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> "destitute state"<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> }}
On July 9, 1992, Sockwell committed suicide by jumping off the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge in Washington's Foggy Bottom.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> Writing just before that event, a Washington critic wrote that despite Sockwell's reputation for being somewhat difficult—""rather excessively endowed with what is known as 'artistic temperament'"—his work was widely shown and enthusiastically received by both gallery goers and collectors.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/> Afterwards ''Washington Post'' writer, Gene Weingarten, wrote a lengthy appreciation of his work and explication of his complex temperament and background.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/>
On June 4, 1992, a solo exhibition of Sockwell's work opened at the Washington Project for the Arts.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1968"/> One critic said it was "one of its worthiest and most compelling shows."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/> Another said that although "everyone praises his art," many people in the local art scene were exasperated with Sockwell.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/> He drank too much, alienated the owners of commercial galleries that showed him, refused to promote his work, would not meet with collectors who were interested in buying, and seemed constitutionally unable to hold down a job. One acquaintance said that Sockwell refused to engage in the business side of art, saying "Carroll thinks being an artist is enough." Another said he did not paint as a career, but because he had to, "like a raw nerve."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/>
In the years following Sockwell's death, his work sporadically appeared in commercial galleries and museum exhibitions.<ref name="artnet bio"/> Among the most significant of these was a retrospective in February 1999 at Case Western Reserve University's Mather Gallery curated by Sockwell friend and mentor James Hilleary.<ref>Plain Dealer: "Artist's abstract drawings possess power" by Steven Litt (Feb 1999)</ref>
==Style and influences== left|thumb|Carroll Sockwell, Untitled, about 1965, gouache on paper, 11 x 8 inches right|thumb|Carroll Sockwell, Untitled, 1973, watercolor and acrylic on paper, 21 1/2 x 29 1/2 inches left|thumb|Carroll Sockwell, Untitled, 1988, India ink and colored pencil on paper, 30 x 36 inches right|thumb|Carroll Sockwell, Legend 3, 1989, mixed media on paper, 32 x 40 inches Sockwell's work was nonrepresentational, integrating both geometric and gestural abstraction.<ref name="Russell bio"/> Critics saw paradoxes in it, perceiving elements both rigorous and free.<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/> One said he achieved an equipoise between the "feral" and the "tame."<ref name="Washington Post Nov 2004"/> A colleague said his "greatest strength lies in his ability to hold polar opposites and contradictions in his mind and resolve them visually in his art."<ref name="Russell bio"/>
Most critics saw in Sockwell's work the influence of his troubled life.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/><ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/><ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/><ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> They found his style difficult to label.<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/> One critic saw in it a unique "synthesis of classical modernism and minimalism."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/> An acquaintance, when asked to pick a phrase to describe Sockwell's art, came up with "classicism in despair."<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/>
Sockwell worked mostly on paper.<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/> He used graphite, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic.<ref name="Washington Post May 1983"/><ref name="Jet Mar 1971"/> Grays, blacks, and whites dominate much of his work.<ref name="New York Times Jan 1969"/> Most of his output was two-dimensional, but he also made mixed-media wall constructions. He made a few large works and many small ones.<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub"/>
The untitled work of about 1965, shown upper left, is an example of Sockwell's handling of gouache in grays and blacks on paper. The untitled work of 1973, shown upper right, is an example of his handling of watercolor and acrylic in multiple colors on paper. The untitled work of 1988, shown lower left, is an example of Sockwell's handling of India ink with subtle use of colored pencil on paper. The work called "Legend 3," shown lower right, is an example of Sockwell's handling of mixed media on paper.
Reviewing the exhibition that opened just before Sockwell's death, ''Washington Post'' critic, Michael Welzenbach, summarized his art as "the invention of beauty and movement for their own sakes, a series of interconnected riffs revolving around a steady chord progression, and a tempo that seems never to falter."<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach"/>
==Personal life and family==
The Sockwell family lived in a house on Virginia Avenue at a location in Foggy Bottom where the Watergate Hotel now stands.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/><ref name="SSDI Sockwell"/> It consisted of Sockwell's maternal grandmother, Sarah Wilson, along with an aunt, Edna Johnson, and her husband, Lonnie Johnson.<ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/> Sockwell's parents were Luther and Annie Sockwell, and his siblings, all of them older brothers, were Edward (twelve years his senior), Paul (eight years), Luther (six years), and Eugene (five years).<ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/> His mother was born in South Carolina in about 1912; his father in North Carolina in about 1903. A few years before his birth, the household's women earned their livings as domestic servants in private homes. Lonnie was then a dishwasher in a restaurant and Luther a laborer in a cemetery.<ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell"/>
Sockwell's father was an alcoholic and reportedly had two other families.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992"/> His mother suffered a schizophrenic breakdown in 1948 and spent 15 years in St. Elizabeths Hospital. Sockwell's aunt, Edna Johnson, took care of him and his brothers with reluctance. One of them told a reporter that she drove them out of the house, one by one.
At various times Sockwell was a patient at St. Elizabeths and in the psychiatric ward of D.C. General Hospital.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992" /> He was both gay and African-American.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992" /> He did not leave a suicide note and did not indicate to anyone that he was thinking about ending his life.<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992" />
== Notes == {{reflist|group=note}}
==References== {{Reflist |colwidth=30em |refs=
<!-- journals -->
<ref name="Crisis 1969">{{cite journal |year=1969 |volume=76 |issue=3 |page=132 | title=Negro Art Show |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GlwEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA132 |journal=Crisis |location=New York |publisher=Crisis Publishing Company |access-date=2019-04-14 }}</ref>
<ref name="Jet Mar 1971">{{cite journal |date=1971-03-04 |volume=39 |issue=23 |page=14 | title=Artist's Black Painting Praised by D.C. Critic |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tzcDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA14 |journal=Jet |location=Chicago |publisher=Johnson Publishing Company |access-date=2019-04-14 }}</ref>
<!-- books -->
<ref name="Ringling 1969">{{cite book |author=John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art |title=The Washington Painters: [Exhibition Catalog:] 17 Artists from the Capital Area |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_fMPAQAAIAAJ|year=1969 |publisher=Scheb Printing Incorporated }}</ref>
<!-- census records -->
<ref name="1940 US Census Sockwell">{{cite census | url =https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K7SF-YBV | title =Edward Sockwell in household of Sarah Wilson, Tract 56, District of Columbia, Police Precinct 3, District of Columbia, District of Columbia, United States | year =1940 | location =Tract 56, District of Columbia, Police Precinct 3, District of Columbia, District of Columbia, United States | roll =557 | page =8B | line =54 | enumdist =1-135 | filmnum =T627 | nafilm = | accessdate =2019-04-15 }}</ref>
<!-- web pages -->
<ref name="Art Therapy Ulman">{{cite web |url=https://arttherapy.columbian.gwu.edu/founders-program |title=Founders of the Program |work=Art Therapy Program; The George Washington University |access-date=2019-04-15 |archive-date=2019-09-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190918170539/https://arttherapy.columbian.gwu.edu/founders-program |url-status=dead }}</ref>
<ref name="SSDI Sockwell">{{cite web |url=https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V9BC-QM8 |title=Social Security Death Index |publisher=U.S. Social Security Administration |website=Accessed through FamilySearch.com |access-date=2019-04-14 }}</ref>
<ref name="Russell bio">{{cite web |url=https://rogallery.com/Sockwell_Carroll/sockwell-biography.html |title=Carroll Sockwell - Biography |work=rogallery.com |quote=This information is from a 1992 essay on Carroll Sockwell by Donald Russell. It was published in a handout by the Washington Project for the Arts for Sockwell's last exhibition in 1992, just before his tragic death |access-date=2019-04-15}}</ref>
<ref name="artnet bio">{{cite web |url=http://www.artnet.com/artists/carroll-sockwell/biography |title=Carroll Sockwell Biography |work=artnet |access-date=2019-04-16}}</ref>
<ref name="MacDonald Lecture">{{cite web |url=https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/lecture-notes-talk-carroll-sockwell-18435 |title=Lecture notes for a talk on Carroll Sockwell |year=1999 |work=Kevin MacDonald papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution |access-date=2019-04-16}}</ref>
<ref name="Ulman Bio Brown">{{cite web |url=https://prezi.com/cj2esdmurijb/elinor-ulman/ |author=Molly Brown |title=Elinor Ulman |work=Prezi |access-date=2019-04-17}}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Gallery of Modern Art AAA">{{cite web |url=https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/washington-gallery-modern-art-records-6048 |title=Washington Gallery of Modern Art records, 1961-1989 |work=Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution |access-date=2019-04-17}}</ref>
<ref name="Harry Lunn The Independent">{{cite web |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-harry-lunn-1196714.html |title=Obituary: Harry Lunn |work=The Independent |date=23 October 2011 |access-date=2019-04-17}}</ref>
<!-- newspapers -->
<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1968">{{cite news |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Monthly Art Calendar |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1968-09-01 |page=E7 }}</ref>
<ref name="New York Times Jan 1969">{{cite news |author=Hilton Kramer |title=Art: Imposition of a Racial Category: '12 Afro-Americans' at the Corcoran |work=New York Times |location=New York, New York |date=1969-01-25 |page=23 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Jan 1971">{{cite news |author=Paul Richard |title=Mirrors of Black Colors |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1971-01-05 |page=B8 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post May 1983">{{cite news |author=Paul Richard |title=Carroll Sockwell's Orderly Disorder |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1983-05-07 |page=C3 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Mar 1978">{{cite news |author=Paul Richard |title=Classical Collages: The Allegiance Of Carroll Sockwell |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1978-03-25 |page=B1 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Weinraub">{{cite news |author=Judith Weinraub |title=The Artist Who Should Be Famous; Carroll Sockwell's Work Is Abstract But His Pain Is All Too Real |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1992-06-13 |page=C1 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Jun 1992 Welzenbach">{{cite news |author=Michael Welzenbach |title=At WPA, the Nuanced Craft of a Master |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1992-06-13 |page=C1 }}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Sep 1992">{{cite news |author=Gene Weingarten |title=Fatal Abstraction; The Death and Life of Artist Carroll Sockwell: An Investigative Obituary |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=1992-09-27 |page=F01 |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1992/09/27/fatal-abstraction/6ee0610e-5bc8-48cf-82eb-9d6aec088ad2/ |quote=Sockwell was indeed gay, and he knew it from the time he was 10 years old. The notion of a boy being consigned by his own family to a mental institution because of his sexual orientation tore at the hearts of the people who cared about him.}}</ref>
<ref name="Washington Post Nov 2004">{{cite news |author=Michael O'Sullivan |title=Brilliance, On the Brink |newspaper=The Washington Post |location=Washington, D.C. |date=2004-11-12 |page=WW34 }}</ref>
}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Sockwell, Carroll}} Category:1943 births Category:1992 deaths Category:Painters from Washington, D.C. Category:American abstract painters Category:20th-century American painters Category:20th-century African-American painters Category:African-American LGBTQ people Category:Corcoran School of the Arts and Design alumni Category:Suicides by jumping in Washington, D.C. Category:American gay artists Category:20th-century American male artists Category:20th-century American LGBTQ people