William Siegel was an American painter and illustrator.
21 Facts About William Siegel
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William Siegel worked in magazine illustration and advertising, before being drafted into the US Army in World War II.
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William Siegel served at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, before being sent to Germany.
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William Siegel was considered "one of the mainstays, one of the people who helped build the School of Art" and is an important modernist artist in Colorado.
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William Siegel's parents were of Russian-Jewish and German-Jewish background but the family was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church for economic reasons.
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In Newark, Delaware, William Siegel studied with Ida Wells Stroud at the Fawcett School of Industrial Art.
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William Siegel went on to study at the National Academy of Design in New York City from 1924 to 1927.
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William Siegel's teachers included Charles Hawthorne, William Auerbach-Levy and Charles L Hinton.
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William Siegel contributed to books and pamphlets of International Publishers, the printing arm of the Communist Party USA headed by Alexander Trachtenberg.
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William Siegel was active with New Masses until 1936, when he chose to leave, disliking the direction the magazine was moving in politically.
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William Siegel's work was included in the 1935 Fifth Exhibition of American Book Illustration, which was sponsored by American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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William Siegel exhibited at the John Reed Club's ACA Galleries in New York City.
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In 1937 William Siegel held a solo show at the ACA Galleries in New York.
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In March 1942, William Siegel Sanderson was drafted into the US Army and sent to Kessler Field near Biloxi, Mississippi for basic training.
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William Siegel served at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver in the Army Air Corps, publishing amusing drawings of life in the army in the base's Rev-Meter newspaper.
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William Siegel had a solo show of black-and-white drawings of army life at the Denver Art Museum-Chappell House, and began painting watercolors.
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William Siegel later used photographs of Berlin to paint a montage of the bombed city, Berlin 1945.
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William Siegel taught at the University of Denver until 1972, when he retired.
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William Siegel's paintings were often inspired by Colorado's outdoors, but reflect his experiences in both childhood and army life.
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William Siegel considered social criticism to be an important part of an artist's work, and was responsive to racial prejudice in works such as Whites Only and Brief Encounter and to Chicano social and political concerns in Tierra y Libertad and La Pulqueria.
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William Siegel died in 1990, after suffering from leukemia and Alzheimer's disease.