Courtright's career rests on a particular act of attention, to the surfaces of old European buildings, the layers of weathered paint and marble dust and torn poster paper that accumulate on Roman walls, and the carved and modeled stone of medieval Romanesque architecture, and his collages and masks are essentially translations of that attention into framed and signed art objects.
Courtright came to art through the public library of his small South Carolina hometown. The early curiosity about historical architecture that he developed there, well before any formal art training, would shape the entire subsequent trajectory of his career. The combination of St. John's College's Great Books curriculum, the New School's progressive intellectual environment, and the technical training he received at the Art Students League gave him a broad foundation unusual for a self-described autodidact.
The 1950 exhibition at Eugene Thaw, a young dealer who would later become one of the most respected American art historians and collectors, placed him in the New York gallery system at the start of his career. But the move to Rome three years later was the formative event. The city's combination of Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture, and the visible accumulation of centuries of paint, plaster, and graffiti on its building walls, gave him a subject matter he could not have found in the United States.
The collage practice that emerged from those Roman years was unlike most American collage work of the period. Where Rauschenberg and the New York combine artists were drawing on the visual language of mass-media print culture, and where the European collage tradition that ran from Picasso through Schwitters through Burri had emphasized formal composition with found materials, Courtright's collages were almost geological, assembled from layers of actual building material that he gathered directly off the walls and surfaces of the city. The pieces he produced through the 1960s were dense, near-monochromatic, and deliberately resistant to any narrative reading.
The grid works of the following decade extended that vocabulary into a more abstract, pattern-based register. The combination of colour, texture, and paper and acrylic on board produced a body of work that read as both architectural and abstract, small-scale walls of pure surface and colour relationship.
The later move to the South of France produced the third major phase of his career. The masks he began making after his encounter with the Commedia dell'Arte tradition extended his practice into the figurative for the first time, and the materials he worked in, cast bronze, marble, paper, and stone, drew directly on the same architectural sources that had underwritten the Roman collages. He worked in this expanded vocabulary of collage and mask for the remaining decades of his life.