American Modernist Seymour Remenick Oil Painting Men with Pigeons Philadelphia

Dimensions: H: 14.5, W: 13.25 IN

Seymour Remenick (American, 1923-1999) Oil on board

Dimensions: 10.5 x 9.5 in, 14.5 x 13.25 in (framed).

Hand signed lower left Remnant of gallery label verso Men with birds, These might be racing pigeons or doves.

Seymour Remenick (1923-1999) American; Philadelphia, PA. was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Philadelphia.

He studied art at the Tyler School of Fine Art 1940-1942 and with Hans Hoffman from 1946-1948, and

at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

His preferred medium was oils.

Remenick painted in styles embodying both abstraction and realism, and it is said that his career is a “quietly stubborn revolt against the prevailing trends of his student days” and that “he has proven that a quiet voice can be heard in a vociferous age.” From 1977 to 1996, he was a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy. His work shifted from the modernist paintings influenced by Hofmann’s teachings, to work made directly from life that relates to the plein-air tradition of Constable and Corot. Remenick exhibited from 1954-62 at the Davis Gallery in New York with great success and later in New York’s Peridot Gallery. In a review, Fairfield Porter wrote that Remenick’s paintings, “with their apparently old-fashioned qualities, compete successfully with the most avant-garde painting in terms of the avant-garde". His oeuvre encompasses darker, early 1950s views of Philadelphia rooftops to brilliant painterly landscapes from Manayunk, the industrial riverside suburb of Philadelphia, where he worked for years.His primary subject is landscape, but he also paints still lifes, figures, and portraits. He began his career as a follower of Hans Hoffman, Abstract Expressionist. However, he realized that the supposed freedom of that style was also very confining, because it was prescribed by the art establishment that resisted rebellion against it.

He felt that the proponents had denied themselves much of the rich material of the real world in their devotion to mood, colors, and shapes.

Remenick enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy for more traditional painting, and his admiration turned to other artists, many of them Old Masters, including Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bruegel, Corot, Turner, and Eakins.

His subjects include city scenes of Philadelphia and its suburbs, mills along Schuylkill River, as well as New England coastal and town scenes including New Bedford and Gloucester. He was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Design in 1982. He exhibited at the American Painting Exhibition, Rome, Italy, Rhode Island School of Design, at the 11 Contemporary American Painters, Paris, France,

the Art Institute of Chicago and others. His work is represented in

public and private collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He has had much success as a painter including receiving the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1955, the Benjamin Altman Landscape Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1960, and a Hallmark Purchase Prize in 1960. Reminick died in December, 1999.