My good friend of 23 years passed on this morning. He was a member of the Citi-Corp coffee gang. I had last visited him in the nursing home in NYC the day before I left for Africa. He was released and sent home to recuperate.
Here is a brief excerpt about his life. I will comment more on Nathan in the coming days.
Nathan Wasserberger, Polish/American (1928 - 2012)
Widely collected and admired in Europe and the United States, Nathan Wasserberger was born in Chrzanow, Poland in 1928. As a young man, he witnessed first hand the horrors of World War II including the death of friends and family and is himself a survivor of Buchenwald.
Despite these early challenges, he went on to study at the Academy Julien in Paris and at the Art Students League in New York.
Early in his career, his paintings reflected the unbelievable injustices committed by the Nazis upon himself and millions of other innocents.
This brooding period was soon replaced by introspective expressions of the joy of life and a celebration of beauty and sensuality. Yet, concealed in every painting, there is a touch of sadness, a carry over of his experiences as a young man. Perhaps also a comment upon the unceasing suffering that still haunts humanity today.
Having 67 photos and color plates of his paintings in the permanent archives of American Art in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, assures this artist a place of honor in American art.
An excerpt from a book about Nathan Wasserberger quotes as follows:
"The treatment of the figure is concentrated, elegant and correct. At the same time there is an additional heritage in the lesson of drawing: The structures of the paintings are clarified, the concentration on the single figures producing the first signs of the crystaline structural clarity his paintings now display. Moreover, the technique is kept light and informal with none of the freezing into cold stiff line which academic figure painters tend to adopt. Finally, adding to this buoyancy is the lesson of tone: A silvery high-key tone begins to infuse the work. It is a luminous spirit lifting tone."
