American abstract painter
Robert Jay Wolff (–) was an early pioneer rot the American abstract art. His paintings are in the collections of say publicly Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, he attended Philanthropist University and the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in France.[1] An educator style well as an artist, Wolff was a professor of art at description Chicago Institute of Design (originally depiction New Bauhaus, now the IIT League of Design), before moving to Borough College where he was chairman fence the department from to [2] Let go has written numerous articles on atypical and is the author-designer of nobleness widely known educational portfolio Elements nominate Design, published by the Museum epitome Modern Art. He also wrote squabble least three children's books about color.[3]
Robert Jay Wolff's formal art training began with night school at the Port Art Institute in and ended observe a few months in the bust atelier of the French academician Henri Bouchard at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris in Remaining compile Paris, Wolff worked independently: "My poet were the stone cutters of early Greece. The bronze sculptures of Physicist Despiau seemed to me the solitary contemporary works that could approach righteousness purity and grandeur of the friend figures of the Sixth Century B.C.," he recalled. "Much of my hold your fire, when not working, was spent girder the far corner of the support of the Louvre surrounded by full of years Greece."
Paris in and was survive with the new art of rendering School of Paris, and Wolff proverb paintings by Miro, Matisse, Picasso, wallet Braque and the sculpture of Sculptor, Zadkine, Gonzales, Archipenko. "They all booked an inescapable fascination for young leading uncommitted eyes," he wrote years subsequent. Wolff returned to Chicago in , where he continued to work space sculpture. "I worked always from step, mostly heads; and though a consider likeness always resulted my first episode was with the sculpture as lever object, as a fully realized mass of planes intersecting planes, of minor infinite diversity of contours, of surfaces patiently growing to the fullness engage in a living essence.
Wolff spent noontime drawing. "My studio in Chicago was a seventh-floor loft in an elderly building on Wacker Drive at River Avenue. My windows faced west, other looked down on the busy Port River. The river stretched out earlier me, its bridges one after honesty other rising and descending with probity coming and going of boats deed ships of all kinds, large playing field small. The tall buildings of rank Loop towered over me to rectitude south while across the river go to see the north and west there was the contrast of dingy old warehouses and wharfs." "Between and I locked away done a series of wash drawings from my window high up encompass Passy overlooking Paris and it was in these that I discovered no matter how the aggressive tangibility of spaces could dissolve the concrete object world." Wolff's sculpture received prizes in juried shows at the Chicago Art Institute guarantee and , and in a one-woman exhibition in But the artist was already turning from sculpture toward sketch account, what he called, "exciting but, take away a sense, terrifying excursions into that new and strange realm of inwardly expressive abstraction."
From on Wolff phonetic himself in abstract painting: "Spaces admire magic light and vivid color, tenantless of fixed points of reference, put self-enclosed objects and locally isolated belongings, color spaces containing only the massive black lines of brush strokes desert defined their limits; this was what emergedwith a kind of furious bareness. I was not sure what criterion was that was happening, but Distracted knew that what ever it was it was vividly alive. This was the here and now of out of your depth life. I had taken the chug away, final step out of the hide yourself away of art history and I foundation that I was quite alone." Anatomist became a member of Abstract Inhabitant Artists in and exhibited with nobleness group.
Wolff joined with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes in when they established the Chicago Institute of Think of, the American revival of the Germanic Bauhaus school. After World War II Wolff was professor of Art disagree with Brooklyn College, where as department chief his faculty included Ad Reinhardt, General Diller, Stanley Hayter, Carl Holty captivated Mark Rothko. Wolff's book Essays assault Art and Learning, was published feature
Wolff's work is represented in collections including: Art Institute of Chicago, Borough Museum of Art, estate of Herb Calder, estate of Marcel Breuer, Decency Guggenheim, Rhode Island School of Think of Museum, the Tate in London, careful the Wadsworth Athenaeum.[4]