Abraham Rattner
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Abraham Rattner (July 8 1893 – February 14 1978) was an artist best known for paintings with religious themes that had very rich colors.
Biography
He was born in Poughkeepsie, New York and was a specialist in camouflage for the army in World War I.
He first studied architecture at George Washington University along with painting at the Corcoran School of Art. However, he soon decided to concentrate on painting and study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1917 and 1919). Rattner lived in Paris from 1920 till 1940 when he returned to New York. He taught at several schools, including The New School, New York (1947–55) and Yale University, New Haven, CT, (1952–53).
He is known for his richly coloured and surrealistic work, much religious in tone, and although he met and studied Claude Monet while in Paris his work is stylistically attuned to Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso.
In 1924, Abraham Rattner married Bettina Bedwell, an American art student and fashion illustrator. Bettina became the Paris fashion correspondent for the New York News-Chicago Tribune Syndicate.In 1947, Bettina Bedwell suddenly died due to a kidney infection. In 1949, Rattner married Esther Gentle, a New York City sculptor, painter, printmaker, and business woman who ran an art reproductions business and a NYC art gallery.
He was the subject of Henry Miller’s 1968 A Word About Abraham Rattner.
Collections
His work is in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL, Montgomery; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL; and The Leepa-Rattner Museum in Tarpon Springs, FL.
