Olivier Foss Expressionist Street Scene Oil Painting "Paris"

Item Details

Olivier Foss (New York/Pennsylvania/France/Germany, 1920 – 2002)
Untitled (village scene with windmill)
Oil painting on canvas
Signed to upper left
Label to verso from W.T. Burger Co., Inc.

Olivier Foss was born in Hanover, Germany, to a professor father who exposed him from an early age both to art and philosophy. After secondary school in Berlin he left for Paris where he attended the Lycee Pasteur and Lycee Janson de Sailly, before studying under Paul Colin and Jean Dupas at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He then left for New York, where he began to exhibit his work, including one man shows at the Riverside Museum and at The New School for Social Research. However, he still had to work various jobs to survive, distracting him from his art, so he moved to Pennsylvania where he worked as a Fine Arts instructor at the University of Elizabethtown, while also studying for a science degree, before continuing his scientific work for a brief period in Switzerland. He eventually settled in Paris to pursue his art, where over the years he developed the personal style he is known for, blending expressionism and architectural abstraction with allegory and spiritualism.

Condition

- craquelure with areas of lift across painting surface; scattered accretion; nicks and scratches to frame.

Dimensions

- measures frame; visible image measures 21" W x 17.5" H.

Item #

ITMG204107