Robert Moskowitz

Demolition Sire #3

Robert Moskowitz was a contemporary American artist who gained recognition in the 1960s onward for his paintings, drawings and prints that saw him working at the intersection of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop art. 

Moskowitz drew inspiration in his early career from such artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although his work has been described as a “significant link between the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School and the 'New Image Abstraction' painters of the mid-1970s,” the Brooklyn-born Moskowitz received relatively little public attention and never achieved the level of fame that many of his peers have. 

In 1948, Robert Moskowitz, son of Louis and Lily Moskowitz, was left to care for their youngest daughter, Karen, after his father left the family and his mother was forced to make occasional trips to Florida for work. He showed little artistic capability as a child but enrolled after school at the Mechanics Institute of Manhattan to pursue engineering drafting. In 1956 he began studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Adolph Gottlieb. 

Moskowitz traveled to Europe in 1959, where he met the British collage and assemblage artist Gwyther Irwin. At Irwin's suggestion, Moskowitz moved into an artist's community outside London where he was able to purchase his first studio space for $85.00, which allowed him to remain in London for one year. 

Moskowitz's first serious body of paintings owed to the discovery of a window shade hanging high in his studio space.

Following lessons taken from Johns, Rauschenberg, and Marcel Duchamp, Moskowitz began to place found objects, such as a window shade, directly on his paintings as a form of collage. This work was included in the exhibition Art of Assemblage organized in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art which also included the work of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg among many other influential artists. His work of this period, primarily untitled collage paintings, culminated in a solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1962, in between solo exhibitions of Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella.

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(Biography provided by Lions Gallery)