Arthur Osver (July 25, 1912 – July 24, 2006) was an American painter from Chicago, Illinois. He was known for his urban landscapes, as well as his later turn towards abstraction and mixed media. Many of his notable paintings feature rooftops, rooftop ventilators, and chimneys as subjects, and employ forced perspective.
Early life Arthur Osver was born in Chicago to Herschel and Yetta Osver, immigrants from Russia. In 1930, he enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. After one year, he transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he trained under Boris Anisfeld. At the Art Institute in 1934, he met fellow painter Ernestine Betsberg, who he would later marry in 1937.
Career Early work and urban landscapes After graduating from the Art Institute, Osver was support as an artist in the Illinois Art Project, the state branch of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program under the Works Progress Administration.
In 1940, Osver and Betsberg moved to Greenwich Village, and then later to Long Island City, where they lived for eight years. Osver described his time in Long Island City as "...the most productive years of my life." In New York, Osver began to find success in the art world. In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art purchased his work "Melancholy of a Rooftop" after he solicited them to view his paintings. He presented a one-man exhibition, which included his painting Majestic Tenement, at the Grand Central Galleries in 1947. His exhibition received favorable response in Art News. Hired by the Art School of the Brooklyn Museum of Art in the same year, he taught students including Lorenzo Homar
Time in Rome and turn to abstraction After winning the Rome Prize in 1952, Osver worked in Italy until 1955. The break from familiar forms of American industrial structures lead to a development of abstraction in his work. Many of his paintings began to lose the recognizable forms that had come to define his work, and instead used pastel colors to mark the impression that sunlight on foreign forms left in him. He would later paint with compromise between structure and abstraction; The Tall Red (1959) has been described as "a temporary armistice between landscape and pure abstraction."
Return to the US Osver returned to New York in 1955 and taught at Cooper Union. In 1960, Osver was hired to teach at the Washington University in St. Louis after encouragement from Philip Guston and Kenneth Eugene Hudson to accept the position.
In his late career, he began experimenting with new painting media. In April 1959, he presented his first showing of water color paintings at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. He also experimented with latex house paints and acrylic enamels. Style Osver's work has been variously described as cubist, geometric abstraction, and associated with New Objectivity and Magical Realism. His early work has been contrasted to the more sharp and pristine industrial subjects of the earlier precisionists like Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, while drawing comparisons to the surrealist works of Giorgio de Chirico.
Osver described his industrial subjects in naturalistic terms, stating of his painting "Nocturne":
He found interest in these subjects in his youth, stating
Legacy The Ernestine Betsberg and Arthur Osver Scholarship was established by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis in Osver and Betsberg's honor in 2008.
Selected paintings Interior (1939) -Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis Melancholy of a Rooftop (1942) -Museum of Modern Art, New York City Sunday Morning (1942) -Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis The Majestic Tenement (1946) -Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia The Tanks (1946-1947) -The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Cluster (1947) -University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor Chimneys and Buildings (1947) -Krannert Art Museum, Champaign Two Ventilators (1947) -Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Rainpipes (c. 1947) -Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington The Enclosure (1948) - Figge Art Museum, Davenport Greenpoint Chimneys (1948) - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Under the Tracks (1951) -Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Gray Night (1952) -The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C Big Withalacoochee (1953–1955) -Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City The Tall Green (1956) -Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis The Voyage (1961) - Smithsonian American Art Museum & Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C. Shinnecock Green and Gray (1963) -Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis Duo (1966) -Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis G.P. 3-73 (1973) -Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis Soloist (no date) -Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Awards 1947 Temple Gold Medal for The Majestic Tenement 1949 Guggenheim Fellowship 1951 Guggenheim Fellowship 1954 Rome Prize 1958 Rome Prize
Publications Miller, Angela (Editor); 2018, Arthur Osver: Urban Landscape, Abstraction, and the Mystique of Place, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis.
References
External links Oral history interview with Arthur Osver, 1976 Jan. 13-14. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.