John LIttle was born in 1907 in Alabama. He attended Buffalo Fine Arts Academy as a teenager, and soon after that moved to New York. He studied opera, opened a textile business, and in 1933 began classes at the Art Students League. Little studied with Hans Hofmann starting in 1937, and this led him toward abstraction and some of his first serious work as a painter. He connected with other important figures in the legitimization of Abstract Expressionism while working with Hofmann, and the coalescence of these artists in New York turned out to be quite important to the development of American painting. Little served as an aerial photographer in World War II, and on returning, with nowhere to stay, moved into Hofmann’s 8th Street studio, where his neighbors were Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. Little’s paintings of the late 1940s experiment with Surrealist automatism, Cubism, and interpretations of the theory of Hans Hofmann. In the 1950s he moved toward a more expressive application of paint and also began to regularly incorporate collage. In 1951 he moved to East Hampton, where he maintained a close friendship with Pollock–the two had a joint exhibition in 1955 at Guild Hall. Little continued to actively exhibit until his death in 1984.
