In 1984, the art historian Helen A. Harrison wrote: "At a time when many artists seem to be angered by paint itself, using it crudely and with little apparent regard for its inherent beauty, Cherry comes off as something of a romantic.

Born in New Jersey to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, he grew up in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and later spent much of his adult life in Manhattan, Woodstock, and East Hampton, New York.

[3] Three years later, then living in Los Angeles, he dropped out of high school and found work as a set designer for the 20th Century Fox film studio.

He made me see color.” [8] Leaving Los Angeles, he knocked around California as an itinerant laborer and then became a cook's helper on a cargo ship destined for Northern European ports.

[6] In the fall of 1931, Cherry returned to Los Angeles where, for the next few years, he ran a gallery in a disused room at the back of a Hollywood bookshop owned by Stanley Rose.

[14] When, in 1934, he gave himself his first solo exhibition at the gallery, a critic for the Los Angeles Times said his drawings had "the beauty of clarity in line and form" and said a self-portrait (shown in the infobox, above) was "strong like wood sculpture and fine in color".

[22] A year later, when the American Artists' Congress gave him a solo exhibition, a reviewer praised his "Portrait of a Poet" and described a gruesome painting showing a corpse hanging on a barbed wire barrier.

[24] Early in 1941, Cherry and Winters designed sets for Duke Ellington's Jump for Joy revue, and later that year, the En's Gallery in Los Angeles gave him a solo exhibition of small paintings and other works.

During the rest of 1949, he visited southern France and Italy, taking photographic color slides and gathering material for lectures he planned to give on his return to the US.

[36] While in France, he met Henri Breuil, the archaeologist who controlled access to the Lascaux Caves and subsequently became one of the first Americans to observe the prehistoric paintings they contained.

[10] Based for a time in Manhattan and having recently divorced from Winters, he developed friendships with Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, Philip Guston, and other artists.

"[38] In 1955, Cherry was given a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery which a reviewer described as containing "night world paintings" that revealed his "his efforts to fuse color and form into a single unit.

[43] By this time, Cherry was spending a good part of his work life teaching art as a visiting professor in US colleges and universities, and many of the solo and group exhibitions in which he participated were consequently held outside New York.

"[3] In 1970, having spent the summer months of the previous few years in rentals, Cherry bought a small house and some land in East Hampton on Long Island, New York.

It does him no disservice to acknowledge that, over the years, his most appreciative audience has been his fellow artists, partly because only a colleague would be fully aware of the intensity of his struggle with the purest problems of painting.

That he has now succeeded in resolving many of those issues in a manner that expands our consciousness of paint's possibilities, while appealing directly to the senses, belies any danger that he will remain of interest only to the specialist.

[4][47] In 1989, when the Ball State University Art Gallery gave Cherry a retrospective exhibition of 60 works dating from the 1930s, the critical response was both extensive and entirely favorable.

A reviewer from a local paper said that Cherry, then 80 years old, was currently making paintings that were "stronger than ever" and described his earlier work as, variously, "dark and delving" or having "all-encompassing brilliance".

[37] In reviewing the Stony Brook exhibition, Helen A. Harrison discussed Cherry's career from the time he became, as she said, "deeply involved in what amounted to a reinvention of painting in the post-World War II years" and she went on to describe his recent work as having "shimmering layers of tone [that] no longer move along a flat, one-dimensional plane, but now shift into relief, advancing and receding as and drifting ice is echoed in the implicit movement that many of his paintings suggest."

He was truly a most unforgettable character and a man of remarkable personal integrity.— Submitted to the AskArt database of artist biographies by Robert S. April, MD, a friend of Cherry's.

One critic described Cherry's 1927 self portrait (shown in the infobox, above) as "decidedly French-inspired, a clumsy Cezanne card player with a strong hand cradling his pipe.

[31][34] A critic who had followed Cherry's career closely, suggested that he gave up making these constructions and returned to painting largely because he felt they attracted the wrong kind of attention.

2), a critic for Art in America called attention to a pictorial structure that was "achieved through the lively interaction" of color shapes and said the painting evoked "sensual pleasure in the physicality of the materials.

She wrote: "Its central field of shadowy grays shimmers like a dark cloud passing across a pool, while linear elements hover over the surface.

[69] In 1954, he wrote articles for the August 1st and November 15 issues of Art Digest, In the first, called "Woodstock; Paradise Lost", he objected to the gentrification of the artist colony in that community.

He saw a great deal of activity but suggested this evidence of collectors' passion might be no more than "a new form of therapy stimulated by the enormous influx of psychiatrists for the Hollywood loot".

In one section, he discussed "wild statements" that the author made about Willem de Kooning, saying they comprised "a neat little package of distortion and willful romanticism and the cheapest type of purple journalese writing.

[6][81] With his family short of money and finding in himself little motivation to study, he soon dropped out of high school and found work first as a migrant laborer and subsequently as a newsboy in Hollywood.

He said that artists were exploited by landlords when they created studio apartments in commercial lofts and that the people who came to see their work, could not "understand a painter's struggling and suffering for the need and the right to try and to fail.

A later report said, "de Kooning strolled over from his studio next door and contributed a freehand figure sketch that carelessly encroached on the space reserved for the abstractionist Louis Schanker."