16 inches x 13 1/2 inches

dated 1938

unframed

The following biography is by Steven Lowy, from exhibition catalog: Champions of Modernism III, Wendt Gallery, 2009. Lowy is an independent curator and President of Portico, New York, Inc.

Seymour Fogel was a noted 20th-century muralist in the United States. Over the course of a long, art career, he executed 22 murals and won numerous art commissions and competitions. His work was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art eight times in the 1940s and 1950s and was included in major exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Art dealers represented his work at major galleries including M. Knoedler & Company, Duveen Graham Gallery and Mortimer Levitt Gallery.

Fogel’s artistic career evolved in an era of unprecedented social and cultural change, and his artwork reflects this constantly changing milieu. He followed socially conscious WPA commissions with ambitious modern and abstract compositions. As Vice President of the Architectural League of New York, he championed the integration of painting, sculpture and architecture. This collaborative spirit links Fogel conceptually with artists of the Bauhaus movement and the Art of Tomorrow.

Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. From an early age he demonstrated strong artistic ability, and was duly enrolled in the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, where he studied under George Brandt Bridgman and Leon Kroll. His first real artistic mentor, however, was the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera who was, in 1932, working on his controversial and ill-fated mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Rivera took on two young artists, Fogel and his good friend Philip Guston, first as unpaid apprentices and then as paid assistants. It was from Rivera that Fogel learned the careful and detailed art of mural painting.

Fogel’s first WPA mural commission was a two-panel mural at Abraham Lincoln High School in New York City in 1936. He chose the two differing themes of classical versus primitive music, however the primitive music panel, in which he depicted drumming African shamans in trance, became highly controversial and was attacked by conservative critic. Fogel would go on to complete murals in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona (another controversial mural proposal), Washington, D.C. and would paint The Rehabilitation of the People in the W.P.A. Building at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair.

In 1943, as World War II raged and the WPA arts programs folded, Fogel felt the need for a change of direction. His works from this period are inspired by European modernists like Picasso and Mondrian, yet reflect the artist’s unique style. Shortly after the war he moved his family to Austin, Texas, in order to accept a teaching position at the University of Texas, where he soon became a leading member of the Texas Modernist Movement. His work, already abstract, was further inspired by the fantastic patterns of erosion he saw in Texas limestone. He used a palette knife on masonite for much of his work in the early 1950s. In the mid-50s, Fogel experienced what amounted to an artistic epiphany and began to experiment with the notion of ‘channeling” art, or letting art paint itself through him with minimal intellectual guidance or direction. Art for Fogel had become an atavistic, primal experience. The resulting abstract expressionist works reveal a wide variety of moods and rhythms, from gauzy and indistinct to bold, smoldering and brash.

A Fogel quotation neatly sums up his new relationship to his art:

“When an artist discovers for himself an element of this [eternal] truth, he paints because he must. He paints with no thought of the hazardous preoccupation with tomorrow, nor the doctrinaire concepts of today. My paintings are my test-tubes in my laboratory. Each is a separate analysis of something newly discovered.” (Pearson p. 221)

Fogel moved his family, now four in number, back East in 1959. In the early 1960s, he rented a home in Weston, Connecticut, and maintained studios in New York City, first at East 17th Street and later a loft on Canal Street. Fogel began to texturize his paintings using a variety of media including candle wax and even bed sheets before ultimately deciding to use sand. (See plate, page Y) He sought to create a direct dialogue between the viewer and the art being viewed, and worked for a time adhering shattered mirror shards to sculptural forms. However, a show of these mirrored sculptures at the Amel Galley in New York City in 1965, was so misunderstood by critics that it left Fogel without gallery representation for many years. Interestingly, Fogel’s lifelong friend Philip Guston suffered a similar critical rejection when he gave up pure abstraction in favor of a politically motivated cartoon style.

John Baur, director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, once said of Fogel: “I have learned the only thing one can safely expect in Fogel’s work is the unexpected. Men like Seymour have worked in all media, explored all styles, and refuse to limit themselves.”

In 1966, Fogel was awarded a mural commission for the Fort Worth (Texas) Federal Building. His mural, The Challenge of Space, represented another major turning point in his artistic vision. Now broad cosmic forms took over his canvases, powerful circles and curves intersected by angular lines, resulting in great transcendent mandalas and diamond-shaped paintings. A host of mosaic murals in New York City – including an exterior mural at the Foley Square Federal Customs Building – followed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sand Painting I and Sand Painting II reflect this juxtaposition of curvilinear and rectilinear and further explore the use of sand as media. The artist used sand of varying coarseness and color as freely as he used his paints.

Fogel closed down his studio on Canal Street in the early 1970s, and combined studio and residence in a former Roman Catholic rectory in Weston, Connecticut, that he named Torandor after a juvenile romantic poem he once wrote to his wife Barbara. This humble house, perched on a bluff overlooking woodlands and streams, became a portal into the mysteries of the natural world for him. As the eroded forms of limestone had inspired him in Texas, now the ferns, vines, tendrils and rock clefts informed his Woodland Series, black and white studies of the often erotic mysteries underlying the material world. (See Illust?.Charcoal on your website) This spun off into the Color Flow Series, where color meanders and pools, like streams across the surface of the painting, or congeals into luminescence, as in Transcendental Form in Blue (see gallery website).

Simultaneously, Fogel was actively involved in creating both raw and painted wood constructions, a further evolution of the power he sensed in the natural world, and some of these took on an almost sacred, totemic role in his life. His Sentinel Series of paintings also reflected this atavistic, totemic presence he sensed around him.

The range and longevity of Fogel’s career generated a prolific and distinctive body of work. When he died in 1984, his drawings, paintings, and sculptures were carefully archived by his daughter, Gayle Fogel Laurel. In addition, numerous sketchbooks, unpublished manuscripts, exhibition catalogs, and mural studies have recently been discovered in storage.

Fogel’s son Jared worked diligently with Faith and Charles McCracken to produce a scholarly book on the artist titled The Art of Seymour Fogel: An Atavistic Vision (Time Again Publications, 2005). His murals are being restored and rededicated. One mural in Austin, Texas, once referred to by Fortune Magazine as the most abstract mural project in the country, is now owned by the state and considered a cultural treasure. Fogel’s mid century studio residence, Southwind, has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and his art has been the subject of two major retrospective shows; one at the Mansfield Arts Center in Ohio and another at Millikin University in Illinois. Four of his mural studies were featured at the WPA anniversary exhibition at the Wolfsonian Institute in Miami this year.

A persistent effort is underway to resurrect the work of this seminal figure in American modern art, so that a new generation may have the opportunity to experience his creative brilliance. Fogel’s spirit lives on through his work.

“I don’t know why artists are here. It’s, I think, almost a biological must, because artists have been here since the first caveman drawings on walls?. The artist still persists, which means, I think, that nature meant the art to be here as a means of human revelation.” — Fogel interview 1984.