Murray Hantman, Abstract Expressionist Watercolor Fiery Sky

Genre: Expressionist
Subject: Landscape
Medium: Watercolor
Surface: Paper
Country: United States
Dimensions w/Frame: 16″ x 28″

Murray Hantman (1904–1999) was a painter, muralist, and teacher. Over the course of his career Hantman’s work progressed from realism to abstraction. His later work shows a mastery of color and form. Based out of New York City Hantman spent summers on Monhegan Island.
Like many of his generation, Hantman ultimately rejected explicit narrative in his paintings for a more primal expression of experience.

Education:
Detroit Museum of Art School, 1916
Detroit School of Design, 1917
The Art Students League, studying with Jan Matulka and Boardman Robinson, 1928-1930

Teaching Positions:
Queens College Youth Center, New York, 1946-48
Private art classes, NY, 1948-59
Brooklyn Museum Art School, Brooklyn, New York, 1959-79

Fellowships:
MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1970
Like many of his contemporaries, Hantman’s work was shaped by the times in which he lived—by the exhilarating sense of the potential of art in the modern era coupled with the harsher realities of American life during the Great Depression and World War II. Those forces combined in Murray Hantman to create an artist profoundly committed to art as an agent of social good and spiritual renewal. As a painter for more than 60 years, and a teacher for 30 of those, he devoted himself to the nurture of creativity and the practice of art.

After a migratory childhood in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, Hantman’s formal training took place at New York’s progressive Arts Students League, where he had the opportunity to work on two major public mural projects—assisting on a cycle of murals depicting the history of commerce for the Kaufman Department Store in Pittsburgh and working with Thomas Hart Benton on the America Today murals created for the New School for Social Research in New
York. Hantman carried those experiences west with him when, while living in southern California for a period in the early 1930s, he joined David Alfaro Siquieros’s “Bloc of Painters” and worked alongside that great Mexican muralist on several outspoken public paintings.

Returning to New York in the mid-1930s, Hantman became a member of the Easel
Division of the Works Progress Administration, rising to the role of supervisor. He also joined the activist Artist’s Union, which advocated for the labor rights of creative workers, where he met his future wife Jo Levy, a sculptor. Together they participated in the lively artistic culture of that time—creating art for the public good, agitating for artists’ rights, and debating, rallying, and socializing with their peers.

At the start of World War II, Hantman was deemed physically unfit for military service and instead contributed to the nation’s defense by working as a designer in a tool shop (an experience jazzily evoked in the painting Machine Shop Symphony). During the war years he began taking painting trips to coastal New England and Canada. In 1945, he visited Monhegan, a small island 17 miles off the coast of Maine, for the first time. Captivated by the island’s dramatic rocky coast and expanses of surrounding sky and sea, he returned to paint there for 30 summer seasons.

Like many of his generation, Hantman rejected explicit narrative in his paintings for a more primal expression of experience. Even as he moved away from representation into abstraction, nature remained the touchstone for his art. The unique quality of Maine’s summer light, the sense of endless space looking out over the ocean, and Monhegan’s distinctive geology all informed the development of Hantman’s mature painting style. Using what he described as a process of subtraction, Hantman worked within the limits of simple forms—rectangles, circles, dots and lines—found everywhere in nature.

While his paintings from this period were largely inspired by summers in Maine, they clearly show an awareness of developments in the larger world of art, from the rise of Abstract Expressionism to the development of styles concerned with optical perception. New York remained the Hantmans’ permanent home and Murray continued to be a presence in that art world, exhibiting in distinguished venues and teaching for 20 years at the Brooklyn Museum School.