Walter S. Feldman

Walter S. Feldman (1925 – 2017) was a modernist American painter, printmaker and mosaicist who spent most of his life and career in Providence, Rhode Island.

He is best known for his expressionist paintings, woodcuts, and public commission mosaics and stained glass windows.

Walter Feldman was born in 1925 in Lynn, Massachusetts.

His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and Feldman grew up in Chelsea “... a Russian-Polish-Jewish community surrounded by Irish”.

While Feldman’s parents hoped he would enter one of the practical professions like law, they appeased his interest in art as a youngster by allowing him to take art classes on Saturday afternoon at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

He became a student at the Yale School of Art in 1942.

. After high school, Feldman was admitted as a student at the Yale School of the Fine Arts in 1942.

From 1943 through 1946, Feldman served in the 330th Infantry Regiment of the 83rd Infantry Division, a unit that saw significant combat in the European theatre.

During his tour of duty Feldman was awarded 4 battle stars, the Purple Heart and the combat infantry badge and reached the rank of 2nd Lieutenant.

His service included action in the Allied Forces defense of the Ardennes forest during the German counter-offensive action known as the Battle of the Bulge.

On January 6, 1945, while under heavy mortar and artillery fire, Feldman sustained shrapnel wounds to his lower back and lay strapped on the top of an Army jeep for five hours awaiting evacuation and treatment.

His near death and harrowing rescue experiences left impressions that would manifest in the artist's work over the decades, as well as leaving him with a life-long injury.

Told he would likely never walk again while recuperating, he overcame the pain and injury turning to painting as a form of healing.

“Through the pain I learned how to paint too.

Pain and painting, I learned the strange verbal connection”

World War II themes played a prominent role in Feldman's art throughout the decades.

A study titled The Soldier is an early example of Feldman's sobering war experience.

It is a macabre image of a skeleton-faced soldier, completed in 1946 when he returned from service.

“I had many moving experiences during the war.

One of them happened at a time when we were having two meals a day during combat.

We were in line getting food, and we were pleased because we had cold rations for weeks.

After I got my food, I started to walk down the steps of a nearby quarry to find a place to sit, and there was a dead German soldier with just his toes sticking out of his boot.

Dead and cold.

That was the memory I had when I did this painting tempura on cardboard”.

Feldman dealt with the pain of war regularly in his art over the course of his career.

Feldman re-enrolled at Yale in the Fall of 1946, he completed his BFA in 1950.

he was awarded the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship and spent a few months after graduation traveling in France and Italy and furthering his exposure to past masters and modern European artists.

As an undergraduate art student (1946-1950), Feldman worked on mastering technical painting skills in a realism style.

The work, The Mother, is a “memory portrait” from this period.

Feldman joined the Yale faculty as an Instructor of Painting for the next two years.

After graduating from the Yale University of Fine Arts (BFA 1950) and Yale University School of Design (MFA 1951), he became an art educator at Brown University for over 5 decades.

He returned to Yale as a graduate student, where his teachers included Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers, and received an MFA in 1951.

Feldman achieved his first major professional critical success when he received the print prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Watercolors, Drawings and Prints exhibition in 1952 for his woodcut The Final Agony.

The print is now in the collection of Yale University, which also acquired the carved wood block.

In 1953 he was appointed to the Brown University art department where he stayed until his retirement in 2007.

The year 1953 marked the artist's first solo exhibition at the Artists' Gallery on Lexington Avenue in New York City, and the inclusion of his paintings in a group show at New York's Kraushaar Galleries.

The exhibited works demonstrated Feldman's stylist drift towards abstraction.

Ardennes Skirmish a dark, brooding abstract painting he created in 1958 is another example that Feldman never ceased painting the haunting aftermath of his war experiences.

In 1990, Feldman founded and was the principal designer of art books of Ziggurat Press in Providence.

During an oral interview in 1998 with Robert Brown from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, Feldman explained "You never forget it, and unfortunately it's true. I sit here and tell you that it happened more than fifty-- fifty years ago! And I remember every nuance, every smell, everything about it. It's unbelievable that you can have such a memory".