Morris Kantor
(American, 1896–1974)
Figures in Movement
1959
oil on canvas, 53" x 56"
Patrons and Subscribers Purchase Fund Born
in Minsk, Russia in 1896, Morris Kantor came to the United
States in 1906. He received his first art instruction in 1916
at the Independent School of Art in New York, where his interest
shifted from cartooning and illustration to abstract painting
based on the model of European cubism. After studying in Paris
in 1927, Kantor’s paintings became less abstract and
more humanistic, as he depicted New York City as seen through
the windows of his apartment/studio on Union Square, and houses
and landscapes of New England. As his career evolved, Kantor’s
work progressed toward the type of lyrical abstraction seen
in Figures in Movement. He used rapidly applied, broad strokes
of bold color together with varying widths of line to suggest
the movement of the titular figures, and also the movement
of the abstracted subject in and out of our vision.
Kantor taught at the Art Student’s League in New York
beginning in the 1940s, where he had an enormous influence
on many young artists, including Robert Rauschenberg. Minnesotan
George Morrison (1919-2000) also studied with Kantor, and his
work in this publication, Naides (1958) is remarkably similar
in its use of color to Kantor’s Figures in Movement,
which was painted less than a year later. Kantor was a Summer
Guest Artist at the University of Minnesota Duluth in 1963
and 1964, and the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tweed
Museum of Art in 1963, at which time Figures in Movement was
acquired. |
