Calvert Coggeshall American, 1907-1990

Calvert Coggeshall worked as an abstract painter and interior designer primarily in Maine and New York City. From 1951 to 1978, he exhibited regularly with the Betty Parsons Gallery, and later with its successor, the Jack Tilton Gallery.

Born in Whitesboro, New York, Coggeshall started his career as an interior designer, working on commissions for clients in the New York City area. He later consulted on the interior designs for Henry Dreyfuss' line of cruise/cargo ships called American Export, popular from the 1940s through the 1960s. In the 1940s, he also worked with inventor Arthur Young to design interiors for the first full-sized scale of Bell helicopter models. By the 1950s, Coggeshall began splitting his time between painting and design work, though he continued to regularly consult and work on several architectural and interior design projects throughout the 1980s.

As a painter, his early monochromatic abstracts were influenced by his friend and abstract expressionist, Bradley Walker Tomlin. An early member of Betty Parson's stable of painters, Coggeshall was friends with other artists, including Jack Tworkov, Grace Hartigan, Katherine Kuh, Nora Sayre, Hedda Sterne, Walker Evans, and Richard Tuttle. Coggeshall often produced his work at larger scales and added a soft, matte finish to create a lyrical effect to his art. After summering and eventually moving to Newcastle, Maine in the 1960s, he began introducing color into his abstract paintings. and A major retrospective of his work was held at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine in 1977. In 1978, he received a Guggenheim fellowship in recognition of his work. Working out of his studios in Newcastle and Manhattan, Coggeshall continued producing abstract paintings into the late 1980s. 

His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, New York State Capitol, and the Buffalo Albright Knox Gallery Museum.