by Romare Bearden 

Several years ago, Gentry agreed to go with me to a small upstate community college where I was to meet with a class in the creative arts. The professor arranged an informal luncheon so the students could listen and ask questions in a more relaxed atmosphere. After I did my best with questions addressed to me, I asked Herbert if he might not give a few comments of his own. Gentry soon had the students enthralled with some of his personal experiences and, also, in the way he explained how art could be related to one's personal and subjective attitudes. 

The reason, I'm sure, that I remember this visit was not only the impressive way that Gentry related to the students, but how much of what he said was an outcome of the very way he approaches his canvases. Indeed, the viewers will find that Gentry's paintings are direct, energetic, fanciful, and are a sensitive man's response to the world about him and to that inner world of resonances and emotions distilled through the mind's eye. 

Gentry has always moved with a distinct freedom in his life and in his art. After World War II, when I was a student in Paris, Gentry opened a cafe-art gallery on the Left Bank, where he not only displayed the works of young artists, but his cafe was one of the first places where American Jazz musicians performed after the long hiatus of the war years. It also should be made known that Gentry was among those American painters in Paris, who, beginning in the early 1950s, helped introduce the American concept of gesture, free invention, and the vivid dissonances of color to the European sensibilities. The style was then known in Paris as "the school of the pacific" and, in this country, of course, as "Abstract Expressionism." 

These were exciting years for Gentry. His works were shown in galleries in France, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. But despite his acceptance in Europe, Gentry constantly returned to this country, and, interestingly, to the street where he was reared, only a few blocks from this Museum. During the past decade, Gentry arranges to spend half a year in Europe and the other months in New York. One thinks of Henry O. Tanner and some of the great Jazz musicians who lived continuously in Europe, where they were received and respected as artists, but Gentry has told me on many occasions that he would find something missing in himself and in his art, should he not return to his roots. There is a distinct American energy and rhythm which, Gentry says, reinforces him, both as an artist and as a person. 

And there is a feeling of released energy and a rhythmical flow in the cursive brushing of Gentry's paintings. He has reduced his approach to a system of flat values, with overlapping planes of color. He thinks of color objectively, to represent a mood, or a feeling. In other words, his method is conceptual rather than realistic. One senses in the chromatic emotionalism, and in the biomorphic forms of the figures that often appear in Gentry's paintings, the strong pull of the unconscious. Yet there is a reverence for art, and a wonderful capacity for resolving the forms and colors in his paintings that achieve an articulated balance in which the tension of the psychological elements are counterpoised into an overall order, so that we can only say: this is "Gentry's world."