Seymour Fogel

Seymour Fogel (August 24, 1911 – December 4, 1984) was an American artist whose artistic output included social realist art early in the century, abstract art and expressionist art at mid-century, and transcendental art late in the century. His drive to experiment led him to work with expected media – oil paints, watercolors, and acrylics – as well as unconventional media such as glass, plastics, sand, and wax.

Seymour Fogel was born in New York City on August 24, 1911. He studied at the Art Students League in 1929 and at the National Academy of Design from 1929 to 1932 under such established artists as Leon Kroll and George Brandt Bridgman.

Fogel was dissatisfied with the schooling he received at the National Academy, noting in his memoirs: “when I left my school, I could copy most anything, draw the human figure and paint it, and nothing else. I didn’t know what a painting really was, how to create anything, and my impressionable mind was firmly molded in academic Papier-mâché.”

In 1932, upon graduation from the National Academy, Seymour Fogel served as an apprentice to the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, then working on his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Fogel and Rivera became close friends, with the latter exercising a formative influence on the former. Rivera introduced Fogel to the techniques of large-scale mural painting.

By the mid-1930s Fogel was an established member of the New York City art community, and was familiar with artists like Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alexander Brook, Georg Theo Hartman, Arnold Blanch, Adolf Dehn, Phillip Guston, Ben Shahn, and Rico Lebrun. Ed Walker, the chairman of Millikin University’s art department, noted that Fogel’s “story reads like a ‘who’s who’ in midcentury American art.”

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