John Opper (1908–1994) was an American painter who transitioned from semi-abstract paintings in the late 1930s to fully abstract ones in the 1950s.

Graduating about 1926 he briefly studied at the Cleveland School of Art and there encountered the artists Henry Keller, as an instructor, and Clarence Carter, as a fellow student.

He spent the following year in Chicago taking classes at the Art Institute and subsequently returned to Cleveland where he enrolled at Western Reserve University, graduating in 1932.

[2][note 2] In 1934 Opper moved to Manhattan and a year later began to work in the studio that Hofmann had set up as the School of Fine Arts on East 57th Street.

[6] In 1937 the influential critic, Edward Alden Jewell, called this effort a "revolt against literary subject-paintings" and said that the great majority of paintings in a current exhibition were simply "objects.

[13][note 7] The water colors and temperas he showed drew favorable comment from Howard Devree, critic for the New York Times, who said his realist and semi-abstract landscapes were vigorous, germane, and expressive and from Jerome Klein of the New York Post, who commended Opper's "sparkling brilliance and unfailing vivacity.

Z. Kruse of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that he was overwhelmed by its overall high quality, saying "there are too many noteworthy contributions to permit of enumeration and evaluation.

[19] Although he spent most of the post-war period in teaching positions outside New York, he was able both to continue painting and to show the works he made.

Presenting a cross-section of modernist American painting and sculpture, the exhibition uncovered an abstractionist movement that was then beginning to gain momentum, particularly in New York.

[21][22][note 11] In reviewing the show, a critic said Opper's painting "exemplified with gusto the leading contemporary abstract trends in its brushfuls of richly stirred color applied in shaggy strokes and sharp accents.

[note 13] Many of his appearances in that gallery were solo exhibitions that were reviewed by critics of the New York Times (1966, Grace Glueck;[30] 1968 and 1971, John Canaday;[31][32] and 1973, 1974 and 1979 Hilton Kramer[33][34][35]).

In 1978 the Montclair Art Museum paired Opper's paintings with those of another abstract expressionist, James Brooks, in a show that a Times critic called "outstanding.

"[36] In 1989, 1990, and 1997 his work appeared in retrospective exhibitions at the Cleveland Institute of Art and in galleries in Sarasota, Florida, and East Hampton, Long Island.

[1] In a 1968 oral history interview he said paintings by Paul Cézanne and Milton Avery impressed him, but he found greatest influence in work by Henri Matisse and John Marin.

During the time that his work was still representational, the reviews he received in New York newspapers noted his facility in handling color.

His transition from semi- to pure abstraction was slowed during three years that he spent making technical drawings for a marine architectural firm during the Second World War.

[19][42] When Opper took a teaching job in North Carolina following the war, he was able to spend more time painting and his style shifted from semi-abstract to fully abstract.

"[2] At the end of the 1940s, a move to Wyoming for another teaching position, led him to work, he later said, in "a kind of abstract style from nature."

"[2] During a subsequent move to another teaching position, this time in Alabama, he later said he was working in highly simplified forms that he saw as "close to Matisse in quality.

"[2] He was of two minds about these extended periods of time he spent away from the emerging abstract expressionist art scene in Manhattan.

He missed the productive ambiance that he experienced when he mixed socially with other experimental artists, but on the other hand he was uncomfortable with the competition for recognition in that environment.

"[32] Where his earlier abstractions had conveyed a sense of space, his paintings from the early 1950s onward used areas of color to effect a two-dimensional means of creating dramatic intensity on the picture plane.

"[36] Ten years earlier, in an oral history session with Irving Sandler, Opper commented on the effort that underlay this rigor and control.

[51] Between 1941 and 1945 Opper worked for a marine architectural company making pipe system drawings of PT boats.

[2] After retiring from NYU in 1974 Opper spent summers in Amagansett, Long Island, and the colder months in Greenwich Village.

[1] Opper died in New York City on October 4, 1994, and is buried in East Hampton's Green River Cemetery.