Herbert Katzman, 1950's Expressionist Interior Oil Painting Still Life with Flowers and Trumpet, 1946

Description

Herbert Katzman 1923-2004 (American artist active in New york, Illinois and Italy)
Oil Painting Dated 1946. Signed.
Dimensions; Sight-16" x … more Herbert Katzman 1923-2004 (American artist active in New york, Illinois and Italy)
Oil Painting Dated 1946. Signed.
Dimensions; Sight-16" x 20", Frame-23.5" x 27".
Provenance: this bears an old stamp verso from Christie's auction house.

Herbert Katzman was born in Chicago on Jan. 8, 1923, His father believing that discipline was a good teacher, sent Herbert and Bob to St. John's military academy for their elementary education but it wasn't long before Herbert found his way to the Art Institute of Chicago where he wanted to study sculpting. His Father vehemently objected and refused to finance his studies, but that wasn't enough to discourage the young artist. He put himself through school working as a student janitor and a few other odd jobs. At 17 he entered the Advanced School of the Art Institute, his interest having turned to painting. His study there was briefly interrupted by a short stint in the navy (1942-44). After receiving a medical discharge, he returned to Chicago to work with Boris Anisfeld, who introduced him to German and French Expressionism. In 1947, funded by a travel grant, Katzman set off for Paris to study the great Expressionists firsthand. On his return to New York, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts, Katzman showed urban landscapes and figure paintings that met with immediate success. Visually rather than intellectually responsive to his subjects, Katzman has recently completed a group of homage paintings that reflect his ongoing commitment to Expressionist masters Chaim Soutine, Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, and Marsden Hartley. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946 and was honored with a Travelling Fellowship. He then moved to Paris where he became a part of a lively scene of young american artists and met his future wife, Duny Baker. During his four year European stay he travelled extensively in Italy, the south of France, England, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Holland and Belgium. Scenes from these countries became subjects for numerous landscape paintings. While in Ostend, Belgium he arranged for a meeting with the Belgian artist James Ensor, who sat for a drawing that Katzman made of him. Many years later, an aged Ensor sitting before his paintings became the subject of one of Katzman's most deeply-felt works.
By the 1950's Katzman was gaining a distinctive reputation as a painter noted for his unique, textured paintings as well as sculpture. He used a palette knife to put thick layers of paint on canvas to give it a dense look. When the dealer Terry Dintenfass opened her Manhattan gallery in 1959, Mr. Katzman was one of the five artists represented, along with Robert Gwathmey, Philip Evergood, Antonio Frasconi and Sidney Goodman. He became a member of the prestigious Downtown Gallery, and in 1952 which is where in 1952 Dorothy Miller the curator at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art discovered his work. She invited him to take part in Fifteen Americans, the 1952 important exhibition featuring Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and other luminaries. Katzman’s hankerings toward beauty edged near the Abstract Expressionist painters’ search for the universal sublime. Mark Rothko intimated infinite depths beneath his prettily coloured squares; Katzman did the same with his pregnant twilights, but he shunned abstraction.
This was followed by many group and one-man shows. In 1955 he received a Fulbright Grant which allowed him to move to Florence, Italy for a year where he painted many landscapes of his new surroundings and made numerous small sculptures modelled in wax and cast in bronze. Upon his return to New York in 1956, he found work as a teacher of painting at New York's School of Visual Arts. For the next decades he painted landscapes and portraits, sculpture and created large drawings in chalk. His reputation grew among conceptual and figurative artists even though the trend against representational art became pervasive in galleries and the media in general.
Some artists better navigated the tides of fashion and thrived. Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, Wolf Kahn, Alice Neel and Jane Freilicher are all examples, Herbert Katzman shouldered on continuing to develop his unique style. Throughout his life his work was bought by museums and major art collectors. Some of his most profound and purest works, miniature paintings and drawings, were done in the last fifteen years of his life. In 2001 Katzman was honored with the prestigious Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner Award. Herbert Katzman died in his studio on October 15, 2004. less