Carroll Sockwell

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.

"[2] 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.

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."

[note 1] 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.

[8] 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.

Other exhibitors included Norman Lewis, Charles McGee, Felrath Hines, Alma W. Thomas, Walter Williams.

[note 4] In 1971 a solo exhibition at the Jefferson Place Gallery called "Mirror Compositions" drew favorable criticism in both the Washington Post and Jet magazine.

[note 6] "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."

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.

[note 7] On July 9, 1992, Sockwell committed suicide by jumping off the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge in Washington's Foggy Bottom.

[4] 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.

[1] Afterwards Washington Post writer, Gene Weingarten, wrote a lengthy appreciation of his work and explication of his complex temperament and background.

[3] 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.

[13] 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.

"[21] 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.

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.

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.

"[1] The Sockwell family lived in a house on Virginia Avenue at a location in Foggy Bottom where the Watergate Hotel now stands.