As a young veteran returning to New York after Second World War, artist Joe Lasker had a classic introduction to abstract art as humbug.
“I lived on $80 a month on the GI Bill, also known as the ‘52/20 club’: 52 weeks, $20 a week. To get that money I had to enroll in a school approved under the GI Bill. School had as much appeal for me as enlisting in the army. No problem, thanks to the Hans Hofmann Art School. Hans Hofmann was the esteemed master and teacher of nonobjective painting, the father of the New York School of painting. His school was known throughout the vet-artist community because you could get your stipend without attending classes, as long as you or a friend signed the register once a week.
“On one of my register-signing days I sat in the class waiting for the register to reach me. I wasn’t drawing; I had no art supplies; I was just daydreaming. Meanwhile, Hofmann was going from student to student, giving each a lengthy critique. Suddenly I realized he was with the student near me and I would be next. I grabbed a stick of charcoal and a large drawing pad a student had left on a nearby chair. Quickly, I covered a page with scrawled lines and blobs. Just in time. Hofmann sat down next to me and praised ‘the looseness, the push-and-pull tension’ of my work of art. His critique lasted 10 minutes.”
Lasker’s works repose in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Baltimore Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, Tel Aviv Museum and dozens of other museums.
His many prizes include Prix de Rome and Guggenheim Fellowships and numerous awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design (where he was National Academician and the former Secretary).
As a young artist disenchanted by abstract expressionism, he was invited to join in the group of 48 outstanding realists—including Edward Hopper, John Sloan and Raphael Soyer—who made up the editorial board of Reality, the mid-Fifties, New York-based polemical journal that argued against non-representational art.
Today, he is “the last Realist,” the last man standing, the only living member of the Reality group of 48.
As a raconteur of that vanished era, he recalls that “Hopper was a very tall man, but very quiet. He let his wife do the talking.”
As for Soyer, a close friend and frequent visitor who painted all the Lasker family members, Lasker recalls lunching with him at Ratner’s, the famed kosher dairy restaurant in New York’s Lower East side. “We were seated with Raphael facing the front door, when, suddenly, he started waving downward with his hand, saying, ‘Don’t look, keep your head down!’ When I asked why, he said, ‘That’s Isaac Bashevis Singer [the Nobel Prize-winning writer]. Don’t let him know we’re here or he’ll hok nit kain tchynik!" [Yiddish for “Stop talking my ear off!”] and he’ll never shut up.”
Lasker remained faithful to Reality’s mission: “I feel that much of American art of the last 60 years has something missing, namely narrative,” he said. “Without narrative there would be little left of the art of the Old Masters, of 20th-century expressionism and surrealism. There would be no Guernica by Picasso and little left of his prints.”
A child of the Great Depression, Lasker grew up in modest circumstances in New York’s Lower East Side. That background led to a lifelong sympathy for the little man, the civil injustice and the lost (political) cause. Critics and curators have consistently cited this narrative trait in his work.
A born artist, Lasker riled his first-grade teacher. As he recalls, “In 1925, when I was six and in first grade, World War I was still a strong presence and Armistice Day was widely celebrated. Teacher told us for art we would draw a military parade.
“We were puzzled. How could we accomplish so complex and difficult a subject?
“Teacher smiled and instructed us to follow step-by-step on our drawing paper what she drew step-by-step on the blackboard.
“First she drew a zigzag line. We all drew our zigzag line from left to right across our paper.
“Next, Teacher drew straight lines from the zigzag’s valleys down to the bottom of the blackboard. We copied her lines.
“On the zigzag line she drew two circles like an eight. Then two upside-down letter V’s. A large letter C was added to the bottom of the eight. A cat. Sitting on the fence.
“Then came the soldiers. Their bayoneted rifles seen above the fence.
“That was the parade!
“Frustrated, I removed the fence and drew a real parade. Teacher gave me a failing mark of D because I did not follow instructions. It was my first encounter with an inadequate art teacher.”
As a high-school student, Lasker attended Cooper Union, where he lied about his age while winning government-sponsored competitions to paint murals. In 1941, the federal Treasury Section of Fine Arts commissioned Copper Mining in Calumet, installed in Calumet, Michigan’s historic post office building, and An Incident in the King Philip War, 1670, installed in the Millbury, Mass. Post office.
“Ever since I was a child I loved to walk,” Lasker said. “The city was very safe then. I walked the entire perimeter of Manhattan. I loved to look at store windows, so I started painting them. These paintings got me into the Whitney Museum. I was in every one of their Biennials and was very well known at the time. A lot of other artists started imitating me.”
His reputation grew quickly. He recalls meeting Lloyd Goodrich, a curator and, later, director, at the Whitney’s 1946 Biennial. “At the opening, I introduced myself to him. He said, ‘I apologize for not having discovered you sooner.’ I laughed and said, ‘Well you couldn’t have because I was in the army and just got out last year.’”
That year marked the first of his many summer stays at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He enjoyed visiting the nearby racetrack with fellow guest Henri Cartier-Bresson, to watch the jockeys exercise the horses. He sketched while Cartier-Bresson photographed.
The last living survivor of such postwar Yaddo groups (think Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein), he vividly recalled poet Robert Lowell.
“Lowell read from his [Pulitzer Prize-winning] Lord Weary’s Castle beautifully. He didn’t have any airs about him. Why would a guy like that be at Yaddo when he was rich enough to afford his own country estate? I was tremendously impressed that he was one of the famous Boston Lowells, with a house named after them at Harvard.
“One day he borrowed a tennis racket from another writer, Charles Neider, and when he returned it, all the strings were broken because he played so violently.
“Neider said, ‘Instead of returning it to me like this, you should have it restrung.’ Lowell flew into a rage and smashed the whole thing on some furniture and handed it back to the surprised writer.
And then about three or four weeks later I read in the Times that Lowell had had a breakdown and entered a mental institution. Back then you were crazy or you weren’t crazy; they didn’t call it “bipolar.”
In 1950 Lasker joined Kraushaar Galleries, New York’s third-oldest gallery, and its stable of American masters such as Maurice Prendergast, William Glackens, John Sloan and John Koch, where he had 13 one-man shows. (Kraushaar no longer represents living artists.)
In recent years, Lasker’s attention shifted away from cityscapes toward the waterfront as seen from his studio overlooking Long Island Sound. In these canvases he painted the sun and sky with a virtuosic technique, a bold colour sense and an exuberance evoking Constable and Turner.