The following was written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher of Laguna Woods, California:
Richard Artschwager was born on December 26, 1923 in Washington,
DC. His
mother was a Sunday painter who did portraits in the style of Oscar
Kokoschka. When he was ten, because of his father's illness, the family moved
to Las Cruces, New Mexico. Artschwager went to Cornell where he studied
chemistry but was drafted into the Army in 1944 and served in the European
theater. In Vienna
he met his first wife, Elfriede Wejmelka, they married and returned to the United States in
1947. He enrolled in Cornell again and
got his Bachelor of Arts degree in Science.
They settled in New York
where he worked in a series of unconnected jobs like bank clerk, lathe
operator, and baby photographer. In 1950
Artschwager borrowed money and bought an old Federal-style building in the Chelsea
section of Manhattan on West
22nd Street.
His sister Marguerite and her husband, a doctoral student named Arthur
Kay, moved in, too. The two men began a
small production company making fine furniture.
Artschwager had evolved into
doing collages with wood, paper, cloth and formica, in a minimalist style. It
might be best to say that the Fifties were preparation for the move to the art
world for Artschwager. He made a great
deal of furniture in those days and even sold one item, a boomerang-shaped
desk, to the Pottery Barn. In 1954 a
daughter was born and two years later his father died In the late 1960s his marriage ended.
In November 1968 he went to the University
of Wisconsin as an
artist-in-residence. There he met Catherine Kord whom he married in 1972. The furniture business went under and after
he went through a period of hibernation his work began to sell and recognition
began to appear on a grander scale. He
experiemented with many widely diverse forms.
Artschwager married a third time; her name was Molly
O'Gorman and they had a daughter, Clara.
Source:
Steven Henry Madoff in Art News, January 1988.
|