Gabriel Laderman

Gabriel Laderman (December 26, 1929 – March 10, 2011 ) was a New York painter and an early and important exponent of the Figurative revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

He studied with a number of leading American painters, including Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko.

In 1948 he began by doing the exercises in Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, which at the time was available only in the original Bauhaus edition in German.

In the summer of 1949 he went to Provincetown and studied with Hans Hofmann.

Since he already knew about abstract expressionist painting (Willem de Kooning had had his first show) he began painting in that tradition, informed with what Hofmann had taught about forming.

He met de Kooning that summer and began to show him his work in September of that year on a regular basis, while also attending Brooklyn College where he studied with Ad Reinhardt, Alfred Russell, Mark Rothko, Burgoyne Diller, Jimmy Ernst, Stanley William Hayter and Robert J. Wolff (the chairman of the department).

He also began to go to Hayter's Atelier 17, which he used as a shop for printing his engraved and etched plates.

About his Brooklyn College years, Laderman said:

After graduating from Brooklyn, he spent a year as a graduate student in art history in the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.

His first exhibited painting, in 1949, was abstract expressionist, in the vein of de Kooning's work.

In 1955, after two years in the army, he went to Cornell University for his MFA, with an assistantship in painting.

During his time there, he began to try to paint from nature with less distortion and invention.

In 1957 he was appointed Instructor in art at SUNY, New Paltz.

Starting with a show of engravings and intaglios at the Tanager Gallery in 1960 his work was painted from nature and always representational.

Starting in 1962, he exhibited with the Schoelkopf Gallery until the gallery was closed, due to the death of its proprietor.

Subsequently, he showed with Peter Tatistcheff.

After two years at New Paltz he was offered a raise in rank, but chose to return to New York where he taught at Pratt Institute until 1967 when he began teaching at Queens College, CUNY.

From 1967 through 1996 he was artist in residence and lectured at many schools and museums, including Princeton University, Yale University, Bennington College, Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania Academy, University of Pennsylvania, the Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art, Boston University, The Boston Museum School, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Amherst College, Stanford University, Kansas City Art Institute, Art School of Surabaya, Art Center Jakarta, USIS centers in Japan in Tokyo, Nagoya, Sapporo and Fukuoka, Royal College of Art, Bangkok, Victorian College of Art, Melbourne; College Ballarat, Indiana University, Bloomington, Louisiana State University, Arizona State, American University, Skowhegan, Chautauqua, the Art Students League of New York, and the Yale-Norfolk School.

His work, starting in the 1980s was usually of the figure including a number of major paintings with subject matter.

The early subject matter paintings were all about crimes, and several were based on the Maigret series of detective novels by the Belgian author Georges Simenon, including the series "Murder and its Consequences", and his most famous painting "The House of Death and Life".

He retired from teaching in 1996 but continued to paint.

Laderman died of heart failure at age 81, on March 10, 2011, in Manhattan.

There, he studied Asian art and 14th century Italian art.

Both traditions influenced his later work.