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BIOGRAPHY
Born
in 1903, Louis Schanker quit school as a teenager and joined the
circus, worked in the wheat fields of the Great Plains, rode the
rails. In 1919, he went to New York and began studying art. He spend
1931 and 1932 in Paris and came back something of a Cubist, becoming
a muralist and graphic arts supervisor for the WPA and a founding
member of The Ten, to which he was attached from start to finish.
Schanker was a radical among radicals. His "conglomerations
of color-patches, among other things," wrote the sympathetic
critic Emily Genauer in 1935, "are bound to alienate no small
part of the gallery-going public." They did not alienate a
small part of the New York art scene, however, and Schanker was
invited to the Whitney Annual, even though he later protested against
it as one of the "dissenters."
By 1937, however, even the hostile New York Times critic conceded
that "Mr. Schanker" had "a touch of lyric feeling."
And in 1938, Art News declared that "Louis Schanker's delightful
Street Scene From My Window calls forth admiration for its delicacy
of color and kaleidoscopic forms in plane geometry." In 1989,
summing up Schanker's career for a book on American abstraction,
Virginia Mecklenburg wrote of "an animated expressionism that
aims at a fundamental emotional structure."
Schanker was also a founder of the American Abstract Artists and
participated in its first annual exhibition in 1937. But a decade
later he wrote: "Though much of my work is generally classified
as abstract, all of my work develops from natural forms. I have
great respect for the forms of nature and an inherent need to express
myself in relation to those forms."
Schanker taught for many years, first at the New School for Social
Research and then, from 1949 until his retirement, at Bard College.
He was one of the major printmakers of the 1930s, but when he died
in 1981, his reputation was in eclipse. By all accounts a delightful
man, Schanker was suspect to some because of his joie de vivre.
Rothko once told Sidney Schectman, co-founder of New York's Mercury
Galleries, "He's a great painter and a great wood block artist,
but I don't know where he's going to go." "He thought
he was frivolous," says Schectman. "Rothko was terribly,
terribly serious."
But Schanker's effervescence has survived him; the Brooklyn Museum
featured an exhibition of his woodcuts and his reputation is currently
undergoing a revival. |
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