Seymour Fogel (American, 1911-1984)
Fogel is recognized as a leader in Abstraction and a key figure in Texas Modernism. Born in New York City in 1911 to Eastern European immigrant parents, he studied at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design under George Bridgeman and Leon Kroll. Fogel’s artistic circle included Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Rockwell Kent and Willem de Kooning. In the early 1930s, Fogel learned mural painting as an apprentice to legendary Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, who was then at work on his controversial Rockefeller Center mural. In the late 30s and 40s Fogel was awarded several WPA commissions including one for New York World’s Fair, and over the course of his career he executed 22 murals nationwide. In 1946 he began a teaching position at the
University of Texas at Austin and became one of the founding artists of the Texas Modernist Movement. At U.T., Fogel initiated a new course on the integration of art and architecture which spurned the University’s first
Rome Prize, then an award for innovative, cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. Later, in 1960, Fogel served as a Vice President of the Architectural League of New York.
He achieved a milestone in 1966 when he created “The Challenge of Space”, a mural at the U.S. Federal Building in Fort Worth, Texas, which ushered in what has been termed the Transcendental/Atavistic period of his production, a style he pursued up to his death in 1984. During his career, Fogel’s work was shown in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. Art dealers who represented his work included M. Knoedler & Co., Duveen Graham Gallery and Mortimer Levitt Gallery. In Nathanial Pousette-Dart’s seminal 1956 work, American Painting Today, Fogel was included as an important American artist alongside Milton Avery, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis. Today Fogel’s work is represented in the collections of major museums, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Texas, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.
