Jay Milder

Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. His grandparents, who came from Ukraine, were descendants of the Hasidic mystic, Rabbi Nachman. As he listened to family stories his interest in spiritualism and mysticism increased, and became an important influence on his philosophy of life and art. Later, when he arrived in New York, he was drawn to the Theosophical Society and the teaching of Helena Blavatsky. Milder graduated from Omaha Central High School in 1952. In late 1953, he traveled to Europe where he studied painting with André L'Hote, and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. He also spent a lot of time studying art at the Louvre Museum, and at the studio of Stanley Hayter. During Milder's time in Paris, the paintings of the Jewish painter Chaïm Soutine, became a primary influence on his own paintings and sculptures. He showed his first major series called "Subway Runners" in 1964 at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. During the 1970s, Milder co-founded a collective group called Rhino Horn with Peter Passuntino, Peter Dean, Benny Andrews, Nicholas Sperakis, Michael Fauerbach, Ken Bowman, Leonel Gongora, and Bill Barrell. Rhino Horn continued a style promoting politically and socially driven American Figurative Expressionism, when many people in the art world and society were focused on Pop Art and Minimalism. Milder's art has been the subject of two retrospectives in Brazil in 2007 at the National Museum Brasilia and, in 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro. In Summer of 2009 he was in Brazil where at this time he painted a commissioned mural alongside Brazilian street artist, Eduardo Kobra in São Paulo. ==Artwork==

Milder's paintings have undergone various stylistic changes since the 1950s. The most common and important consistency has been his organic form of Expressionism. Biblical references have always played an important role in Milder's work. From Milder's perspective, the Kabbalah underlies all aspects of reality including not only the way a painting is conceived and executed, but also its impact on the visual environment around us. In a 1976 article in Arts magazine titled, “Jay Milder: Painter of Discovery, Resolution and Rediscovery,” historian George Nelson Preston contextualized Milder's artistic process as “trance-like,” and labeled him “an important painter's painter and … an historian's painter.” Milder's first notable series of paintings are his "Subway Runners," "Subway Faces," and "Subway People," which are stylized representations of human figures within an environment that references the New York City subway system. Milder painted in these figures in such a heavy impasto that they often protrude out off of the canvas. While the "Subway Faces" and "Subway People" depict clusters of figures alluding to riders packed into subway cars, the "Subway Runners" feature large solitary forms that stretch across the canvas as if they were running to catch a train. From the 1970s through the 2000s, much of Milder's artworks have been centered around interpretations of the Kabbalah, including Jewish numerology. ==Collections and awards==

Jay Milder's work is in the permanent collection of galleries and museums throughout the world, including The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art in Tel-Aviv, Israel, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, The RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. Milder received the Mexican Government's Honor Award for artists in 1957, a Rainbow Arts Foundation Award at Exhibition Museum, Guadalajara, Mexico. in 1965, he was honored as Professor Emeritus at City College of New York in 1991, and in 1999 he was the Cultural Exchange representative between The United States and Brazil at the Belles Artes Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ==References==