April

Joseph Benjamin O’Sickey, 1918 – 2013
April, ca. 1965
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
Signed lower left

Provenance
Deaccessioned by The Cleveland Art Institute for their Acquisition Fund

O'Sickey is widely viewed as a member of the Cleveland School, a group whose work bridged tradition and modernism in the first half of the 20th century.

More accurately, O'Sickey was part of the wave of Northeast Ohio artists who matured after World War II, and who helped shape generations of young artists through teaching at area universities and colleges. O'Sickey also loved his early art lessons at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he learned to paint in ink on paper with Chinese brushes.

In an interview at his house in Twin Lakes last December, O'Sickey said that he and his close friend Roy Lichtenstein both grew disenchanted with Abstract Expressionism, which came to dominate American art in the late 1950s. Lichtenstein responded by taking inspiration from commercial art, advertising and Disney cartoons as a way to separate his work sharply from the visible angst and splashy brushwork of the Ab-Ex painters, particularly the second-generation imitators of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. O'Sickey, meanwhile, reasoned that he could make an art that was authentically his - and not imitative of anyone else - by drawing and painting his favorite subjects in a quick, spontaneous manner.