| Frederic Taubes | ||
| Birth Date: 1900 |
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| Death Date: 1981 Artist Gallery |
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| Perhaps known more by younger generations of artists for putting his name on a line of artists' canvas and supplies, Frederic Taubes pursued a multi-dimensional career as artist, writer on art, and printmaker.
Born in 1900 in Lwow, Poland, where he studied art privately, Taubes fled with his family to Austria when World War I began, studying at the Imperial Museum and Academy of Art in Vienna. After the War, he studied one year at the Academy in Munich before involving himself in a one hundred eighty degree directional change in artistic philosophy by attending the avant-garde Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920.
Not surprisingly, the young artist fell under the Bauhaus spell, particularly the color theories of Johannes Itten and this influenced him throughout his career. During the 1920s, Taubes experimented with a number of styles, including Cubism, dada, Expressionism and the New Objectivity. In 1930 Taubes sailed for New York and after four return trips to Europe, he determined to settle permanently. Conditions in the depression stricken city were anything but auspicious for a young, foreign artist eager to make his way. However, mustering the strength that had served him in Europe, Taubes eventually found a gallery interested in handling his work. During the following years in America, Taubes became a successful society portraitist, creating likeness of such moneyed and influential personalities as Clair Booth Luce and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst.
Taubes’s fame peaked in the mid-1940s. In 1944 he published “Oil Painting for the Beginner,” which became the standard art students’ text for the next ten years. Between 1943 and 1962 Taubes had a regular column “The Taubes Page” in American Artist magazine. After 1955, Taubes all but ceased showing his work, although ne never stopped painting, energetically altering and developing his art until his death in 1981.
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