Yearly Archives: 2012

Ben Shahn (1898-1969)

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Ben Shahn was an American artist known for Social Realism. He emigrated from Lithuania to Brooklyn after his father was exiled to Siberia for revolutionary activities in 1902. Ben Shahn held deeply left-wing political views, which informed his art practice. He had a deep affection for American workers, immigrants, and disenfranchised communities, and often expressed an abhorrence for injustice and oppression. He depicted scenes from American life which often commented on political corruption and societal woes.

Konrad Cramer (1888-1963)

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Konrad Cramer grew up in Wurtzburg, Germany, and attended the Karlsruhe Academy. He was a member of Der Blaue Reiter—among one of the earliest modernist movements in Europe. Der Blaue Reiter, based in Munich, was founded by Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Franz Marc, among others.

In 1911, Cramer married Florence Ballin, an American artist studying in Munich. The couple moved to the United States, and eventually settled in Woodstock, New York, where they were soon active in a circle of artists that included Andrew Dasburg, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Elie Nadelman.

Cramer’s first exhibition in the United States took place in 1913 at the Arts Club, where he exhibited several of his “Improvisation” paintings. Cramer also found success as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

The artist was among one of the first to practice pure abstraction in painting in the United States. Later he returned to more representational imagery influenced by both abstraction and folk art. Cramer taught at the Woodstock School of Painting and the Dalton School in New York City. He remained active as a teacher and artist in Woodstock up until his death in 1963.

Keith Haring (1958-1990)

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Keith Haring, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, is one of the most celebrated and recognizable artists of the Pop Art movement. Haring’s style emerged from graffiti culture in New York in the 1980s. He died of AIDS-related complications at his Greenwich Village apartment in 1990.

Elsie Driggs (1898-1992)

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Elsie Driggs (1898-1992), was an American painter known for her contributions to the Precisionist Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, and for her later floral and figurative paintings. Her works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and many others.

John Button

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(1929-1982)

John Button Resume

Born in California, John Button (1929-1982) was educated at University of California, Berkeley. After moving to New York City in the early 1950s, he became friends with Fairfield Porter and Frank O’Hara and assumed his part in the New York School of painters and poets.

Amidst the frenzy of Abstract Expressionism, Button remained true to his interest in realism, and is now most commonly associated with such New York School artists including again Fairfield Porter, along with Jane Freilicher and Alex Katz, among others. Concerning Button, Bill Berkson has written: “The scaled-up perceptual intimacy his best paintings assert is part of what the realist wing of the New York School developed, beginning in the ‘50s, as a counterthrust to—as well as an absorption of—abstraction’s headlong specifyings of applied paint.”

Dieter Appelt

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Dieter Appelt (b. 1935) is a German artist working in a variety of media, primarily photography. He studied music from 1954-1958 in Leipzig. In 1959, he left East Germany and settled in West Berlin to study in the music school of Berlin until 1964. That same year he decided to study fine art and began experimenting with painting, photography, etching, and sculpture. His first exhibition was at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1974.

Appelt is well known for his photographs from the 1980s addressing the mechanics and techniques of the medium. In 1990 and 1999, he took part in the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Berlin.