LOUIS SCHANKER

TREETOPS CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY

Greenwich-Stamford, Connecticut

Tel. 203-979-6052

Great performances in an intimate setting

Louis Schanker, Artist


Study for WNYC Radio Station Mural, 1939-40

First art exhibit at the Treetops Chamber Music Society. September 14 & 21, 2008. Art by Louis Schanker.

Artist Louis Schanker

Louis Schanker (1903-1981) was an American abstract artist.

Born in 1903, Louis Schanker[1] quit school as a teenager and joined the circus, worked in the wheat fields of the Great Plains and rode the rails. In 1919, he went to New York and began studying art. He spent 1931 and 1932 in Paris and returned to New York as 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 affiliated till the end.

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, 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, Edward Alden Jewell, conceded, when speaking of Schanker's major WPA mural at the municipal building studios of WNYC in New York, that “Mr. Schanker” had “a touch of lyric feeling”. 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.”

Schanker was also a founder of the American Abstract Artists and participated in its first annual exhibition in 1937. 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. The January 1955 Life Magazine article "Comeback of an Art," describes him as, "One of the earliest U.S.woodcut artists to do abstractions, Schanker since has trained or influenced a generation of talented younger artists." Students

He was one of the major printmakers of the 1930's. He continued to be an active part of the New York art scene with many group and solo exhibitions including two shows (1943 and 1974,) at the Brooklyn Museum and a 1978 retrospective at the Associated American Artists. Just a few blocks from the hospital where he died in 1981 the Martin Diamond Gallery was holding a major show of his oils, sculpture and prints and his work was on exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 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.”

He married stage actress and singer Libby Holman on December 27, 1960 and survived her.

But Schanker’s effervescence has survived him as there is still continuing interest in his works. 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”.