Josef Presser (1907 Lublin - 1967 Paris), Seaman

Biography
Josef Presser was born into a Polish-Russian family of Jewish descent. After immigrating to the United States, he received a scholarship at the prestigious Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He studied painting under Philip Hale for four years, then spent the next four years perfecting his workshop skills by analyzing the works of the masters in the museums of France, Italy and Belgium. After returning to the States in 1931, he settled in Philadelphia. He painted figures of the poor, people from the margins of society populated his canvases. In 1940 Presser moved to New York occupying a studio on 14th Street, Union Square District. In 1941 he married Agnes Hart; he and his wife obtained a summer studio in Woodstock while becoming a member of the Maverick Artist Colony and the Woodstock Artists Association. He spent the last three years of his life in Paris. In 1965 he became an honorary member of the Cercle Litteraire et Artistique, an association constituted in Brussels. The artist's works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Musem of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Galleria degli Uffici in Florence. Individual exhibitions of the artist took place in prestigious galleries in Boston (1925), Paris (1928), New York (1930, 1943, 1959), Philadelphia (1939); posthumous exhibitions were held in Woodstock (1968), Lublin (1993) and Cologne (1996). In Presser's painting on display there are clear reminiscences of the art of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, who masterfully operated with pastel technique in depictions from the world of the circus and theater, the world of artistic fiction reflecting the drama of human existence in the mollycoddling of a large metropolis. Clowns, comedians and pierrots, immersed in thought, melancholy, enclosed in the reality of their own experiences, are constant protagonists of Presser's paintings since the 1930s. Freely laying color patches and layering colors, the artist builds in them a mosaic painting tissue, from which he brings out silhouettes of figures dynamically guiding the drawing contour. The power of the colors intensifies the expression of the compositions while giving them a decorative quality. He died by suicide in 1967 in Paris, where he lived for the last three years of his life.