Vintage American Artist WPA Era Oil Painting Signed Nat Ramer, "Black Jester", 36 x 24"
Born in Lemberg, Ukraine, Ramer immigrated to the US with a family holding strongly progressive views (a younger brother, Aaron, was killed in the Spanish Civil War while serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade). During the 1930s Ramer’s work was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1934), the Corcoran Gallery (1935), and the Montross Gallery (1936), among other venues. Reviews of his work suggest a protean sensibility, of choosing “to experiment in different fields of painting and “submit[ting] them all to public scrutiny” (Offin). Another visitor thought his “more imposing” figures and still lifes were “not as inviting as his lighter and more fluent” landscapes—an opinion seemingly shared by those who allocated three works to the Mt. Morris sanatorium (“The Critic”). Ramer continued to evolve, in the 1950s influenced by abstract expressionism, in the 1960s and ‘70s according to his nephew “doing some large lucite cast abstractions with found objects that had a La Brea tarpits kind of quality” (Friedman). All this while he maintained a studio upstairs from Max’s Kansas City on Lower Park Avenue, sometimes teaching art classes at Brooklyn College. Much of his work suffered fire damage from the club below or was not preserved after his death.

36 x 24 x 2 in

10 lb