CAREER-SPANNING ARCHIVE OF NEW YORK CITY ARTIST JACK PAUL MAROON, 42 VOLUMES PLUS LOOSE ART, PHOTOGRAPHS, SKETCHES, COLLAGES, SCRAPBOOKS, AND CAREER EPHEMERA, 1960s–1990s

Item #1695

CAREER-SPANNING ARCHIVE OF PARSONS-TRAINED NEW YORK ARTIST JACK PAUL MAROON, WITH 42 VOLUMES OF ORIGINAL DRAWINGS, WATERCOLORS, COLLAGES, PHOTOGRAPHS, EXHIBITION RECORDS, JAPAN MATERIAL, THEATER WORK, GAY-INTEREST CONTENT, AND DOCUMENTATION OF WORKS IN THE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

Massive and unusually complete career archive of Jack Paul Maroon, also known as Simon Paul Maroon, a Springfield, Massachusetts-born, Parsons-trained artist who spent much of his adult life in New York City, particularly Greenwich Village. The archive comprises 42 separate volumes, including sketchbooks, portfolios, photograph albums, scrapbooks, binders, and folios, together with approximately 100 loose original works, many individually sleeved or matted. The material dates primarily from the 1960s through the 1990s, with some later biographical documentation, and preserves in remarkable depth Maroon’s work as a painter, sketcher, illustrator, designer, traveler, theater documentarian, and determined self-archivist.

Maroon graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1948 and later studied at the American Fine Arts School at Fontainebleau, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and other European art schools. His own lengthy autobiographical statement, included in the Parsons School of Design Class of 1948 50th reunion volume, describes an itinerant postwar artistic life: Paris, Fontainebleau, Rome, Capri, Morocco, Greenwich Village, Los Angeles, London, Greece, Mexico, Jamaica, Japan, Switzerland, South Africa, and elsewhere. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the Asiatic Pacific Theater and later moved between Massachusetts, New York, Europe, and other locations before making New York his principal base.

The archive is especially strong in its documentation of Maroon’s exhibition history and professional ambitions. Included are press releases, invitation cards, exhibition announcements, posters, flyers, reviews, typed resumés, collection lists, price lists, and biographical statements. These document one-man exhibitions at Capricorn Gallery, the Preston Selection, Flynn Gallery, Borgia Gallery at Elmira College, Gallery A, the New York Public Library, East River Savings Bank, Bodley Gallery, Donnell Library, the Springfield Central Library, and other venues, together with group exhibitions and related professional records. The material also includes an obituary from *The Republican* of Springfield, Massachusetts, summarizing Maroon’s life, military service, Parsons training, travels, and artistic career.

A particularly important part of the archive concerns Maroon’s work documenting threatened and demolished theaters in London and New York. Press releases, posters, correspondence, drawings, and related material describe his “Painting Theatres” project, including London West End playhouses, Royal Shakespeare Company connections, Off and Off-Off Broadway venues, and New York theaters including the Morosco, Helen Hayes, and Bijou. A letter from Dr. Mary C. Henderson, Curator of the Theatre Collection at the Museum of the City of New York, confirms that the museum was “happy to have” Maroon’s paintings of the Morosco, Helen Hayes, and Bijou in the permanent collection, noting that the works preserved the theaters as part of the history of the city and its theatre.

The original artwork is extensive. The archive includes hundreds of drawings and sketches in pen, ink, pencil, marker, watercolor, crayon, and mixed drawing media. Subjects include New York street life, theater interiors, actors, musicians, cafés, portraits, architectural studies, domestic scenes, social gatherings, travel subjects, male figures, self-portraiture, and erotically charged or gay-interest imagery. Some work is highly finished; other pieces are loose observational sketches or working studies. Maroon’s line drawings are often brisk and theatrical, with a commercial-illustration quality, while his stronger travel watercolors and figure studies show a more expressive and atmospheric hand.

Travel material forms another major component. The archive includes original and reproduced work from Japan, Morocco, Jamaica, Italy, Switzerland, England, France, Greece, Mexico, and South Africa. The Japan material is especially well documented, with exhibition ephemera, maps, postcards, press clippings, collector lists, and watercolors connected to Maroon’s time in Osaka, Kobe, Ashiya, Kyoto, and Tokyo. His Japanese work included watercolors of foreign-designed buildings and local scenes, and the archive contains printed and photocopied materials relating to exhibitions and commissions there. Other travel sections include Marrakech and North African market scenes, European rooftops and villages, Jamaica-related exhibition material, and watercolors of London and continental subjects.

The archive also contains notable literary and media-related work. One section includes material connected to Maroon’s drawings of Françoise Sagan for a British periodical feature, “Confessions of a Compulsive Gambler.” Another section documents his work as a designer and colorist for wallcoverings, including clippings from the trade press. There is also evidence of commercial design work, including jacket design material for Herbert H. Rowen’s *A History of Early Modern Europe, 1500–1815*. Maroon’s own unrealized projects are represented as well, including proposed books, line-drawing projects, and manuscripts.

Photography is present in quantity and adds considerable documentary value. Several albums contain New York City street scenes, theater-district views, signage, storefronts, restaurants, and urban architecture, many apparently from the 1970s and 1980s. Other photographs document Maroon’s paintings, exhibitions, studio life, and travels. Of special interest are photographs of Greenwich Village and gay social life, including outdoor gatherings, street scenes, and male subjects. These images expand the archive beyond an artist’s working papers into a broader visual record of New York, queer social space, and the postwar Village milieu.

The archive has strong gay-interest content throughout. This appears in drawings of male nudes and couples, homoerotic collages, photographs of gay street life and gatherings, self-fashioning material, and clippings relating to exhibitions that featured male figure studies. Some collage material, occasionally signed “Jacaroon,” includes repeated self-portraiture, eroticized male imagery, and playful or theatrical constructions of identity. The content should be understood as part of Maroon’s broader self-documenting artistic practice and as a meaningful component of the archive’s Greenwich Village and queer cultural interest.

A striking section documents Maroon’s service on a New York grand jury in 1971. In simple line drawings accompanied by snippets of testimony and courtroom dialogue, he recorded defendants, witnesses, lawyers, and moments of civic drama. These sheets are among the most immediate and compelling works in the archive, capturing the texture of New York legal life through brief visual and verbal fragments.

Also included are multiple albums of press clippings, exhibition reviews, invitations, and personal publicity. Maroon not only saved his career documentation, but repeatedly copied, rearranged, annotated, and preserved it. This obsessive self-archiving is central to the interest of the collection. The archive presents not merely a body of artwork, but the lifelong record of an artist constructing his own career narrative: exhibitions, disappointments, commissions, unrealized ambitions, travel, patrons, collectors, and public identity.

The collection is housed in three boxes of albums, portfolios, binders, sketchbooks, scrapbooks, and folios, plus an additional box of loose matted and sleeved artwork. Formats and sizes vary widely. Contents include original art, photographic prints, color photocopies, black-and-white photocopies, typed and handwritten documents, press clippings, posters, invitations, exhibition ephemera, resumés, price lists, and biographical material. Many items are undated, and a complete item-by-item inventory has not been attempted. Condition varies by component, with expected handling wear, toning, creasing, edgewear, tape stains, binder wear, aging to plastic sleeves, and general use wear throughout; overall, the archive remains substantially intact and highly navigable.

A major archive of a minor but well-documented New York artist: visually uneven, but rich, layered, and unusually complete. Maroon may not have achieved the public recognition he sought, yet this archive preserves the full machinery of an artistic life — the training, travel, exhibitions, theater projects, commissions, self-promotion, queer-inflected imagery, New York documentation, and persistent effort to make a career in art. As a whole, it offers significant research value for postwar American art, Greenwich Village, theater history, gay-interest visual culture, Japan-related American artist travel, self-archiving, and the lived economy of the working artist.

Price: $6,000.00