Seymour Fogel
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[edit] Introduction
The artist Seymour Fogel is part of the story of twentieth-century American modern art. Seymour Fogel’s artistic output, like that of many luminaries of modern art, spanned decades of unprecedented social and cultural change.
As a result, his career was not limited to one style, one brand. Seymour Fogel produced social realist art early in the century, abstract art and expressionist art at mid-century, and transcendental art late in the century. His independent and restless nature spawned the creation of both representational and nonobjective artworks. His drive to experiment, explore, and evolve led him to work with expected media – oil paints, watercolors, and acrylics – but also surprisingly unconventional media such as glass, plastics, sand, and wax.
[edit] Education
Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. He studied at the Art Students League in 1929 and at the National Academy of Design from 1929 to 1932 under such established artists as Leon Kroll and George Brandt Bridgeman.
[edit] Career
In 1932, upon graduation from the National Academy, Seymour Fogel served as an apprentice to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, then working on his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. From 1934 to 1941 he was awarded several mural commissions by both the Works Progress Administration (“WPA”) and the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, executing murals in such places as Brooklyn, New York; Safford, Arizona; Cambridge, Minnesota; Washington, D.C. and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
In 1946 Seymour Fogel moved to Austin, Texas where he accepted a teaching position at The University of Texas at Austin. He became an integral part of the Texas Modernism movement, along with such artists as Fearing, Lester and Umlauf. In Texas he executed what have been considered the first abstract murals in the state for the American National Bank (1953), the Baptist Student Center at the University of Texas (1949), the First National Bank in Waco (1955), the First Christian Church in Houston (1956) and the Petroleum Club, also in Houston (1950). He pioneered the use of ethyl silicate in his mural commissions.
In 1959 Seymour Fogel moved back to New York City where he maintained a studio and established his residence first in Westport and then in Weston, Connecticut. During this time he began to experiment with texturing his paintings with such material as paraffin, cloth, wood and sand. In New York Seymour Fogel produced transcendentalist art which he referred to as “atavistic.” Mural commissions at this time include the U.S. Federal Building in Fort Worth, Texas (1966), the Hoffman La Roche Corporate Towers in Nutley, New Jersey (1964), Public School 306 in Brooklyn, New York (1967) and the U.S. Federal Customs Building in Foley Square, New York City in 1968. In the latter stage of his mural career, he used mosaic as his primary medium.
In 1974 Seymour Fogel relocated his studio from New York City to his residence in Weston. In this last decade of his life, Fogel focused entirely on atavistic art in a variety of forms: paintings, drawings, collages and both painted and raw wood constructions. Seymour Fogel died on December 4, 1984.
[edit] Exhibitions
Fogel’s art was exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art , the Telfair Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Fine Art.
Fogel generated an astonishingly prolific and distinctive body of work. John Baur, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, noted Seymour Fogel’s art was shown at the Whitney museum many times. Of Fogel, Baur said: “I have learned the only thing one can safely expect in Fogel’s work is the unexpected. Men like Sy have worked in all media, explored all styles, and refused to limit themselves.”
Greta Berman, an art historian and educator at Juilliard College in New York City, also knew Fogel well. She wrote the best articles on Seymour Fogel published during his lifetime. In “Seymour Fogel: Self Knowledge Into Form,” Berman wrote: “Fogel’s endless exploration into self and the eternal world reaches beyond easy definition … revealing a multitude of dimension and meaning that forms the very essence of art.”
