Louis Schanker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louis Schanker, American (1903-1981)

For more history on Louis Schanker go to LouisSchanker

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.

--essay written by Paul Solman, 1999

Public Collections

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

The Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts

The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio

CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder

The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY, Purchase College, Purchase, New York

The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey

New York Public Library, New York, New York

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska