Vintage American Abstract Modernist Abraham Rattner Gouache and Watercolor,Titled "Green and Yellow", SLR, 9 x 6 1/2" image, 22 1/2 x 20 1/2" Framed.
Abraham Rattner, known for his rich, Rouault-like color, was born in 1893 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Though he would later meet Claude Monet when studying in Paris, Rattner was temperamentally and stylistically attuned to Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso.
Initially combining study of architecture at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., with painting classes at the Corcoran School of Art, he quickly decided to concentrate on painting.
In light of his later segmented style, and given the fragmented, patchy nature of camouflage in his breaking up the contours of forms on canvas, it is interesting that Rattner would have been a specialist in camouflage for the army during World War I.
He had begun study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts* in 1917 before the war interrupted that endeavor. After the war, he attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts* in Paris as the result of a traveling fellowship from the Academy. He would live there until World War II began in 1939. Most of his paintings were left in Paris when he fled. Back in the United States, Rattner would illustrate a book by Henry Miller, chronicling their extended cross-country travels by car.
Rattner is best known for religious themes and a very expressive style similar to stained glass with incredibly rich, glazed, impasto paint and color divided into glowing segments by thick black lines. In his last years, the artist moved closer to an Abstract-Expressionist* style.
Rattner died in 1978.
Abraham Rattner taught at the American Academy* in Rome. He was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters*. His work is in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Newark Museum, New Jersey; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City.

22.5 x 20.5 in

10 lb