1. Arthur Lerner was born on 1929 and is an American artist, known for his atmospheric figurative paintings and drawings, landscapes, and still lifes.
18 Facts About Arthur Lerner
1. 2.
Arthur Lerner is sometimes described as a realist, but most critics observe that his work is more subjective than descriptive or literal.
3.
Arthur Lerner was born and raised in the ethnic neighborhood of Humboldt Park on Chicago's west side.
4.
Arthur Lerner studied under painters Louis Ritman and Boris Anisfeld, earning his BFA and MFA at SAIC.
5.
In 1961, Arthur Lerner joined the art faculty at City Colleges of Chicago, where he would teach until retiring in 1996.
6.
Arthur Lerner continues to work and live, with his wife, artist Carole Harmel, in Chicago.
7.
Arthur Lerner's work reflects both a deep connection to art history and a commitment to his own deeply personal path.
8.
Arthur Lerner has a longstanding affinity for the figure as a universal metaphor capable of expressing the full range of human experience.
9.
Over time, Giacometti's influence on Arthur Lerner grew and his work became more detached and ethereal, with "substantiality and concreteness displaced by diffusion of light" and color suppressed in favor of tonality and pale hue.
10.
The shift, glimpsed in portraits, such as Laura I, continued into the 1990s when Arthur Lerner returned to the figure after abandoning it for roughly a decade.
11.
Arthur Lerner then turned to spare groupings of natural materials like rocks, shells, driftwood, leaves, bones and gourds that have been likened to Zen gardens in their "calculated casualness," careful arrangement, and spatial tension.
12.
Concurrent with the still lifes, Arthur Lerner began painting Maine coastscapes.
13.
Arthur Lerner wrote that paintings like Coastscape Series III revealed keen observation, yet diverged from reality to create a sense of feeling and atmosphere that became almost abstract.
14.
Arthur Lerner began his teaching career at Ray-Vogue College, a commercial art school in Chicago, in 1955.
15.
Arthur Lerner worked there until 1957, teaching fine arts, illustration and design.
16.
Arthur Lerner modeled his approach on that of his own SAIC figure drawing teacher, Robert Lifvendahl, taking a highly structured approach to teaching foundational technique and methods to a broad spectrum of students that included college teens, blue-collar workers, and retirees.
17.
Arthur Lerner taught at Ox-Bow School of Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961.
18.
Arthur Lerner has been recognized with National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Fulbright Grant, and a James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship.