Remembering John Griefen, 83, Pioneering Tribeca Artist

John Griefen in his 57 Laight Street studio in the late 1970s. Photo courtesy of the Estate of John Adams Griefen

John Adams Griefen, a pioneering Tribeca painter who lived and worked in the neighborhood from 1966 until 2001, died in October in Bergerac, France, at age 83. Griefen’s abstract works have been widely exhibited in the U.S. and Europe and are in the collections of major museums. Below is a remembrance of the artist by his daughter, Kat Griefen. 

My father moved to his first loft in Tribeca at 458 Greenwich in the mid 1960s after graduating from Williams College and spending a summer as a “Freedom Rider” on an integrated bus. In Mississippi he worked with Headstart but was sent back north due to a health issue acquired while “painting” the inside of a water drum. An artist from a young age, my father encountered contemporary art via the parent of a high school friend, Costantino Nivola, whom he visited on Long Island along with the sculptor’s neighbor, Jackson Pollack. Maybe the most consequential of all was, in 1966, my father’s first meeting with the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, who became a friend and a frequent visitor to his Tribeca studios. 

The early 1970s cemented my family’s life in Tribeca as they bought 57 Laight Street, a six-story loft building which they shared with other artists. Working on the fifth floor, with our family living on the floor above, my father completed the painting that would garner his inclusion in the definitive exhibition, “Lyrical Abstraction,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and an untitled work acquired by the Met in 1981. His vast studio with a floor-long wall of windows was ideal for creating the large works he executed using a utility broom to apply paint to canvas. 

I was born in 1982 and my earliest memories with my father all take place in the studio where I “worked” alongside him. I remember many of the visitors including artist Kikuo Saito who often brought gifts, such as a hand-carved wooden sheep on wheels that I have to this day. Artist Rebecca Smith lived nearby on Watt Street and we visited her frequently as well. William O’Reilly, his dealer and closest friend lived at 458 Greenwich and briefly at 57 Laight on a lower floor. Mark and Barbara Golden of Golden Artist Colors always arrived laden with buckets of brilliant new materials. Every Sunday from 1984 until his move to Brooklyn in 2001, my father’s studio was host to a lively group of students and friends, often painting with a live model.

In the 1990’s, Tribeca was the ideal location for my father and me to develop our devotion to the raucous range of female musical artists that garnered 1993 the title of the “Year of Women in Rock.” At the Knitting Factory, we attended my first real concert (Julian Hatfield). At least once we went together to the music venue Wetlands, which was near our building. But Collister Street, the alley next to us, was a frequent hangout for beer drinking clubgoers, causing my father to paint a “no peeing” symbol on the freight entrance to our building. As a result, it smelled even worse as the kids found irony in aiming at his signage. 

Living on Laight Street was a strange mix of things, with graffiti that backdated the spot by a decade, real wolves living on an adjacent roof, and, with the police horse stable nearby, the sound of clomping hooves on cobblestones. My father loved it all, as did I. 

This October, while in his last studio in Saint Avit-Sénieur, France, where he lived with his second wife, Nancy Dawson since 2009, I found writing regarding his years in Tribeca: “The art world,” it said, “was smaller and friendlier then.”