User:Davidrlasker/sandbox

American painter and illustrator Joe Lasker (1919-2015), was literally the “last realist,” the last surviving member of the 48 notable 20th-century realist painters—including Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Raphael Soyer—who wrote for Reality, a mid-Fifties polemical journal that argued against non-representational art.

“At this point, Joe Lasker is American history,” says Dr. Audrey Ushenko, Professor of Art and Art History, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. “He was a major narrative American realist who played a vital role in the continuation and development of the country’s distinctive brand of narrative realism. As a realist, he pointed out aspects of the real world and represented them with a freshness that tore the veil off reality. Never having succumbed to the modernist cliché that contemporary art should be shocking, distasteful and disturbing, Lasker illuminated the miraculous in a world we take for granted. He was also notable for his sensibility to design. This is manifest in the streamlined compositions within which he distilled the richness and complexity of visual reality. His work is proof that the indigenous realist tradition is as seminal an influence on American painting as the influence of European modernism. In the future, these artists will be recognized for their important contribution to 20th-century art. This contribution is their ability to evoke detail and richness with fairly minimal means, which makes that art distinctive from European realism.

Marshall N. Price, Chief Curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, says, "Joe Lasker belongs to a generation of artists who carried forth that important American tradition of social realism. His figure-based works and his landscapes are filled with narrative content and can be understood within the context of the long lineage of humanist painting."

Lasker's oil paintings and watercolors depict cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, fantasies, interiors, seascapes and still lifes. His works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Butler Institute of American Art and other venues.

His prizes include the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design, where he was National Academician and Secretary.

Lasker remained faithful to Reality’s mission. “I feel that much of American art of the last 60 years has something missing, namely narrative,” Lasker said in a 2003 interview. “Without narrative there would be little left of the art of the Old Masters, of 20th-century expressionism and surrealism. There would be no Guernica by Picasso and little left of his prints.”

He illustrated and/or wrote dozens of children’s books, including American Library Association Notable Books Merry Ever After (1976) and The Boy Who Loved Music (1979) for Viking Press. Several notable American artist friends painted his portrait, including Alice Neel, Charles Reid and Rafael Soyer. His work is represented by Liss Gallery in Toronto.

CRITICAL COMMENT

ARTnews:  December, 1951: Pictures that veil social commentary within a romantic realism…The pictures...clearly disapprove of conditions which force children to amuse themselves on city streets or in courtyards shadowed by tenements....The Little Match Girl, for example, stacks scrawny Christmas trees against a handsomely variegated wall while the youngsters at play are unobtrusive yet forceful symbols.

January, 2004 (Mary Schneider Enriquez): This retrospective [at Kraushaar Galleries, New  York] of 84-year-old Joe Lasker’s landscapes, self-portraits, and genre studies recalled the artist’s extraordinary technique, engaging wit, and lifelong preference for realism.

In Horn of Plenty (1951), which Lasker describes as Simone Martini’s symbol of peace attacked by the music of Dr. Strangelove, a woman in a flowing gown reclines on a cushioned chair, her garlanded head propped against her arm, while a red-coated musician, wearing a black knight’s helmet, blows an outsize tuba in her face. The drape of her gown and the shining curves of the tuba illustrate the facility with which Lasker manipulates pigment....

In Exorcism (2000), a sun-dappled New England church appears with flying devil figures — appropriated from illuminated manuscripts — descending from the steeple. They flee from two angels blowing trumpets from above. Lasker’s riffs on art history, life, and convention are delivered with refreshing charm, irony, and skill.

Apollo, April, 1959: Lasker...has evolved a vital style that has its own kind of freshness.... One unusual aspect of Lasker’s work is the fact that expression for him depends on the representation of subject matter in real space.... This interest in subject matter has behind it a great sympathy for people and a leaning towards depicting themes that awaken one’s social conscience. The poor and the weak come into his iconography.

Life (magazine, March 20, 1950: El Candy Store by Joe Lasker, painted in New York’s Puerto Rican district, shows a forlorn and neglected child huddled against a window which is decorated with Halloween masks. Poor children appear in many pictures by Lasker, who is deeply concerned with the tragic effects of the slums on the young.

National Institute of Arts and Letters, Presentation of the Grant in Art by Allen Tate, President of the Institute, 1968: He is both a realist and a true humanist. His subjects are men and women – and often children whom he paints with special sympathy and understanding. He captures an evasive mood, a whimsical idea, notably in his Cezanne series. His work is quiet, sincere, and thoughtful.

The New York Observer, April, 2003 (Hilton Kramer reviewing the 178th Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design): Lasker…commands our interest…. There are many fine paintings to be seen. (Remember painting? Like, you know, oil or acrylic on canvas?)

The New York Times: Dec. 6, 1947: Several of the new names are identified with especially stimulating canvasses, among them, Joe Lasker. (Howard DeVree)

Dec. 2, 1951: The romantic realism of Joe Lasker: At the Kraushaar Gallery, Joe Lasker’s first one-man show confirms the very real and personal expression noted in his pictures in various group exhibitions. This is sound and sensitive painting, a little somber, exceptionally well organized, with clean and subdued color. But behind and beyond the technical aspect of his work, Lasker depicts children and street scenes with compassionate insight, personalizing them and never slipping into the trivial, the anecdotal or the merely illustrative. Light, clarity and rich if subdued color help him in carrying conviction. And there is a psychological warmth and penetration in the work which augurs well for development, which should be furthered by his Prix de Rome year. (Howard Devree)

April 5, 1959: Pictures by Joe Lasker at the Kraushaar Gallery comprise sensitive, sentimental studies of children, and delicate, understated landscape drawings. Lasker is a romanticist after the fashion of Berman and Tchelitchew, giving his figure studies extra amounts of self-awareness. This psychological intensity, expressed in the color as well, forms the main strength of these pictures (Stuart Preston).

Feb. 1, 1964: Fundamentally an intimist painter, particularly responsive to the changing moods and uncertainties of childhood, this artist has a special way of seeing figures and landscape….His contemplative work, where feeling is underplayed, will please those who do not seek shock value in art (Stuart Preston).

Jan. 12, 1974: There are sly references to the history of art and to such past masters as Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Ensor in these paintings. But despite the good humor and the obvious self-kidding – Van Gogh in South Norwalk, for instance, depicts that artist wending his way home to the little frame house in which Mr. Lasker apparently lives – these works succeed as thoroughly creditable examples of contemporary realist painting. Mr. Lasker has considerable tact and expertise in the handling of generally soft, low-key color. The silky light with which he imbues so mundane a subject as Pine Tree Studio is marvelously effective. And the clever visual strategies of The Jewish Bride, — another studio view, with a glimpse of a Rembrandt masterpiece – produce a tour de force (James R. Mellow).