Eugene J. Pyle

Eugene J. Pyle was born on March 30, 1914, in Halstead, Kansas, a small town with a population of about 1,200. He arrived in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1936 to study at the Kansas City Art Institute with a working scholarship through which he assisted an instructor in return for tuition payment.

Gene Pyle was immediately taken in by Thomas Hart Benton, then a painting professor at the institute, and became closely involved with the circle of artists surrounding him. In the 1993 book Under the Influence: Students of Thomas Hart Benton, artists Duard Marshall and Charles O'Neill remembered Pyle's impressive talent as a draftsman and his closeness with Benton. Pyle's physical appearance left an equally strong impression -- O'Neill recalled frequently hearing the remark, "Gene is like a Greek god!" and Marshall confirmed that "all the girls were in love with him" (Berardi and Adams, Under the Influence, 133).

Gene Pyle received a diploma in 1938, and in 1940 he was hired by the Art Institute to teach courses in drawing and painting alongside Benton. During this time, Pyle frequently participated in local competitions and exhibited work in a range of media, including watercolor, tempera and lithography. Two of his works were included in Benton's exclusively curated Kansas City Regional Art: An Exhibition of Paintings by Artists Studying with Thomas Hart Benton in 1940. 

By 1941, Gene Pyle enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. While stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, he and fellow Kansas City artist Frederic James created a mural depicting army engineer life in 1942. When the war ended in 1945, Pyle was stationed in Florence, Italy, where he befriended an old man named Fioretti Fioretto, a ceramics manufacturer and photographer. Fioretto introduced Pyle to amateur photography while they took walks together documenting the recently liberated Florence.

Pyle continued to pursue photography after he returned to the United States and quickly gained notoriety for his skill. After graduating from Colorado College, Gene Pyle was hired by the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design in 1948 as a photography instructor and resident photographer. He extensively documented new additions to the college campus, and his prints were sent out to prospective students in accordion-folded postcards, versions of which still exist in the Art Institute's archives. Pyle was given a prestigious one-man display in the 1950 Annual Salon of the Camera Club hosted by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.

Pyle moved to New York, where he began working as a commercial photographer for advertising agencies and magazines including Life, Time, Fortune, Business Week, Sports Illustrated and Popular Photography. In the 1960s, he spent several years living abroad in Rome, continuing his work as a commercial photographer and artist. By 1967, Pyle was back in the U.S. and had accepted a position at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as the Wingate Paine Photography Fellow. The next year he took a teaching position at the University of Georgia in Athens, and in 1972 he began teaching at Morehead State University in Kentucky, where he remained until 1976.

In an interview for the Andover Townsman (Andover, Massachusetts) in 1967, Gene Pyle described the influence of his education as an artist upon his approach as a photographer. "If all there was to photography was setting the aperture, and letting it cook while you go off to lunch, I wouldn’t be interested," Pyle stated (Andover Townsman, July 20, 1967). Instead, he experimented with techniques of distortion that altered the usual darkroom printing process in order to yield expressive, painterly effects. One of his most frequently used processes was that of solarization, in which a developing print was exposed to outside light, creating spontaneous blurs of light and shadow across the surface of the original.

Pyle invented a technique to create fractured, kaleidoscopic images using a thick layer of beveled glass. He was also an early adopter of Cibachrome, a color-printing process developed in the 1960s. In addition to his abstract and expressive photography, Pyle spent considerable time documenting those around him and other artists. He created portraits of photographers Alfred Eisentaedt in 1953 and Andre Kertesz in 1971-1972. He created a series of portraits of his mentor Thomas Hart Benton in 1950 and photographed the painter Reginald Marsh at Coney Island around the same time. Pyle was also fascinated with nature and landscape and took photographs wherever he went.

There is little information about Gene Pyle's activities during the late 1970s or of his death in 1981 at age sixty-seven. However, Gene Pyle bequeathed a collection of 790 of his photographs, prints and paintings to the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, where they are currently all available online. His photographs belong to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and can be found in archived magazines across the country.