John McLaughlin was an American abstract painter born in Sharon, MA in 1898. In 1935, McLaughlin and his wife Florence Emerson (descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson) moved to Japan where they lived for three years. Upon their return in 1938, McLaughlin established a business dealing Japanese prints. It was around this time that he decided to start painting, which was brought to a halt just a few years later with the start of the war. Fluent in Japanese, McLaughlin was recruited as a translator by the Army during WWII. After the war, McLaughlin settled in Dana Point, California, where he started painting full time in 1946. Entirely self-taught, the artist continued to paint, with considerable success in his later career, until his death in 1976. Solo museum exhibitions include John McLaughlin: Western Modernism, Eastern Thought, Laguna Art Museum and The Prints of John McLaughlin: Site of Contemplation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, John McLaughlin Paintings: Total Abstraction, November 13, 2016-April 16, 2017. Selected public collections include Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York among others.
