James McGarrell was born in
Indianapolis, Indiana, and began painting in the basement of his parents' house at age 20. His first formal art studies were at
Indiana University Bloomington and at the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He then entered the graduate painting program at the
University of California, Los Angeles. In 1955 McGarrell had his first solo exhibition at the Frank Perls Gallery in
Beverly Hills, California and received a
Fulbright grant to the
State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. After returning from Germany in 1956, McGarrell began a long distinguished academic career at
Reed College in
Portland, Oregon. Three years later he returned to Indiana University to direct the graduate painting program. In 1981 he accepted a position in the
St. Louis School of Fine Arts at
Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained until his retirement from teaching in 1993. He has also been an artist in residence at many institutions for short periods, most notably at Skowhegan, the International School in
Umbria,
Rice University, the
University of Utah,
Arizona State University, and
Dartmouth College. During the past half century McGarrell had more than a hundred solo exhibitions at galleries and museums in America, England, France, and Italy. His paintings, prints, and drawings have been included in hundreds of exhibitions in the United States, South America, Europe, and Japan. He was a member of the National Academy and Correspondent Member of the
Académie des Beaux-Arts de l'Institut de France. In 1995 he was the recipient of the Jimmy Ernst Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. McGarrell held residencies, grants, and fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the study centers of the Bogliasco Foundation outside
Genoa and the
Rockefeller Foundation at
Bellagio in Italy. He was also senior resident at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program in New Mexico. His work has been included in: five Whitney Annuals and Biennials; the
Carnegie International exhibition twice (1958 and 1983); New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1960); the Dunn International at the Tate Gallery, London (1963 and 1964); Documenta III (1964)in
Kassel, Germany; and USA Art Vivant at the Musée des Augustins,
Toulouse, France. He was one of five painters selected for The Figurative Tradition in American Art at the U.S. pavilion of the 1968
Venice Biennale. In 2003 several of his paintings were included in La creazione ansiosa: da Picasso a Bacon, a survey exhibition of later 20th-century art at the Palazzo Forti,
Verona, Italy. McGarrell's paintings are in the permanent collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the
Art Institute of Chicago, the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the
Portland Museum of Art, the
Saint Louis Art Museum, the
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the
Centre Pompidou, the Hamburg Museum of Art, and many other public and private collections in America and Europe. He was represented in New York by the George Adams Gallery. ==Family==