Robert Courtright was a South Carolina-born American expatriate who spent more than half a century working in Europe, first in Rome and then in the South of France, and whose architectural collages, made from scraps of paper, marble dust, and flaked paint pulled directly from old buildings, became one of the most distinctive postwar collage practices.
Robert Courtright (October 26, 1926 – December 2012) was an American collagist, painter, and sculptor, born in Sumter, South Carolina, and a long-time resident of Europe. Largely self-taught, he studied at St. John's College and the New School for Social Research before enrolling at the Art Students League in New York under Jack Levine, Robert Brackman, Carl Holty, and Vaclav Vytlacil. His first exhibition was at Eugene Thaw's New York gallery in 1950.
A 1953 move to Rome was the decisive geographic event of his career. The colours, walls, and weathered surfaces of the ancient city redirected his practice from painting toward collage, and he began to make the architectural collages, built from scraps of paper, marble paste, and flaked acrylic taken directly from Roman buildings, for which he is now best known. Through the 1960s the architectural collage dominated his work; in the 1970s he developed a parallel body of grid collages combining colour, texture, paper, and acrylic on wood panels. He later moved to the South of France, where the Mediterranean Romanesque architecture and the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte prompted a long body of cast-bronze, marble, paper, and stone masks. He died in Opio, France, in December 2012. His work is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Museum of Art in Nice, among others.