American painter, sculptor, printmaker, poet and musician. He was a jazz saxophonist before he was encouraged to take up painting by two artist friends, Jan Freilicher (b 1924) and Nell Blaine (b 1922), who shared his enthusiasm for jazz. After brief service in the US Army Air Corps during World War II (1942–3), he studied with Hans Hofmann from 1947–8 in New York and Provincetown, MA. He painted for a short period under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists but, after seeing Pierre Bonnard’s retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948, he began to apply his facility for drawing to figurative subjects extracted from the intimate circumstances of his family life and everyday surroundings. The first such pictures, for example Interior, Woman at a Table (c. 1948; New York, Pat Cooper priv. col., see Harrison, p. 29), were stylistically very close to Bonnard’s work, but in such works as Double Portrait of Berdie (1955; New York, Whitney; see fig.) a startlingly frank, life-size nude study of his mother-in-law, he created a personal idiom that transcended the influence both of Bonnard and of Willem de Kooning, whom he had met in 1948.

From Grove Dictionary of Art