Robert S. Neuman
American, 1926 - 2015
Robert Sterling Neuman was a second generation Abstract Expressonist, who over the course of a sixty year career crafted a prolific body of work marked by a color saturated palette and painterly sensibility. Light and color were the underpinnings of his aesthetics, and his body of work was distinguished by his extended thematic series, which were often inspired by outward observation.
Neuman was born in 1926 in Kellogg, Idaho, and briefly studied at the University of Idaho before serving in the Army Air Corps in the waning days of World War II. Arriving in San Francisco in 1947 at age 21, Neuman discovered the work of Bay Area Abstract Expressionist artists Richard Diebenkorn, Sam Francis and Clyfford Still. Their work was a revelation, and had a profound and lasting influence on him. He enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts under the GI Bill to study commercial art, and continued as a graduate student in painting at the San Francisco College of Fine Arts. In 1953, Neuman was granted a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Stuttgart, Germany under German Expressionist Willi Baumeister. After he returned from Germany, he accepted a teaching position at SUNY New Paltz, where he became friends with fellow art department faculty Jules Olitsky and William Daley. There, he began the first in his series of paintings, “The Black Paintings,” inspired by the gloom of occupied Germany. Next, he studied in Spain under a Guggenheim Fellowship, and began a series of works, “The Barcelona Series,” inspired by the brilliant shafts of morning light pouring into the narrow city streets. He returned to settle in Boston where he taught at Massachusetts College of Art, Brown University and Harvard University's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. In the early 1960s, he had his first sold out show at the renowned Pace Gallery in Boston, with a second show following in 1962 and in then 1963, 1966 and 1972, shows at Allan Stone Gallery in New York City. In the 1960s, he traded a painting with friend and art gallery owner Allan Stone for a house on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. There, his Space Signs and Stacks and Piles series were born, inspired respectively by the night sky and rocky landscape. In 1972 he was offered the chairmanship of Keene State College’s art department, which at that time consisted only of a few classes. He spent the next 20 years building the department from the ground up. After his retirement from teaching and until his death in 2015, Robert Neuman continued to paint prolifically and act as a mentor to young artists.
Neuman’s work has been on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work is included in public collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University.
Robert Neuman Paintings Art
