With sweeping, slashing strokes, Price conveys the raw energy of a tornado. Dark blue streaks cut across softer background forms, capturing both intensity and turbulence. Price’s works were not intended as social commentary—despite his advocacy for civil rights—but as direct translations of visceral feeling onto canvas. As one critic observed, Price’s art is “deliberately harsh,” a quality the artist himself linked to sensation: “One should get a sensation from painting just as you get a sensation from smoking a cigarette or drinking whisky. You can’t be prejudiced. You must tear down mental barriers before you can feel the sensation that comes from an abstract painting.”
Price studied at the Art Students’ League and painted in the Works Progress Administration. He became friends with the future abstract expressionist painters in New York and participated in the famous Ninth Street Show in Greenwich Village in 1951. He taught at the Philadelphia Museum and School of Industrial Art (later the University of the Arts) and taught at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial before leaving Philadelphia in 1958 for a position at the University of Alabama. Price’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Woodmere, among others.
