American painter and sculptor. He was one of the few members of the New York School born in New York, and he studied at the Art Students League under Robert Henri and John Sloan in 1920–21. He spent the following year travelling through France and Germany and studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris. On his return to New York in 1923, he attended the Parsons School of Design and Cooper Union Institute. He was the best travelled of the New York painters (rivalled only by Franz Kline), having been to Paris, Munich and Berlin before even beginning advanced formal studies, and the breadth of his training and art-historical knowledge served him well in his teaching, which was his principal means of support during the mid-1930s. His first one-man exhibition was in 1930, and he showed regularly thereafter as a member of the emerging New York School respected by his contemporaries for his learned and earnest approach to painting.

From Grove Dictionary of Art