1948 Irving Amen Spectral Figures Number 4

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Irving Amen (1918-2011) MCM watercolor and ink on blue paper. Pencil signed and titled. Amen, who was Jewish, served in … Read more Irving Amen (1918-2011) MCM watercolor and ink on blue paper. Pencil signed and titled. Amen, who was Jewish, served in Europe in World War II and the Spectral Figures series is his response to the losses of the Holocaust.

A twentieth century sculptor, painter, etcher, silk-screen and woodcut artist, at the age of fourteen, Irving Amen won a scholarship to Pratt Institute, where he studied from 1932 to 1939. Amen also studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Academy Grande Chaumiere in Paris. He had his first exhibition in New York at the New School for Social Research in the 1940s, and in 1949, Amens was given a one-man exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Travels throughout Israel, Greece and Turkey in 1960 led to a retrospective show at the Artists House in Jerusalem

In the early 1960s, Amen taught sculpture and printmaking classes at the Pratt Institute (1961) and at Notre Dame University, South Bend, Indiana (1962). During the 1960s through 1980s, Amen's work was exhibited with the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Library of Congress and the National Academy of Design. Among his commissions were a Peace Medal commemorating the end of the Viet Nam war and for a synagogue in Columbus, Ohio, designed a stained glass window of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Amen's work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. See less