George W. Drew Art

The painting evokes a sense of peace, a dissolution of form and light. The viewer seems to be looking at the surface of a quiet pond, reflecting the sky, trees, and clouds. Water lil...

This early 18th-century oil painting by an artist active in the workshop of Francesco Solimena (1657-1747) depicts the Virgin Mary holding the sleeping Christ Child, with Saint Josep...

A vibrant mid-century landscape painting by American artist Doris Lee, depicting a small Colorado mountain town in summer. Executed in oil on board, the...

In “Soon to be Evening,” artist Alexander Khrapachev depicts with subtle sensitivity one of those moments when nature and human activity meet on a common horizon. At first glance, it...

Unknown (American, nineteenth century) River Bank Oil on canvas, 9 x 13 1/2 inches Unsigned Framed: 13 1/2 x 18 inches (approx.)

This original 1980s oil on canvas by Edward Marecak presents a compelling example of the artist’s mature style, blending semi-abstract composition with recognizable human forms. The ...

This painting has been produced by a European 19th Century painter who is noted to be working in the style of Rudolf Jordan. This picture is produced in the Romantic style depictin...

This striking mid-19th century oil painting captures the drama and majesty of a perched eagle surveying its domain at dusk. Painted around the 1840s, the work evokes the spirit of th...

A vibrant postimpressionist painting depicting moored gondolas and sailing vessels in a harbour, with reflections of colourful building façades shimmering in the rippling seawater. T...

A fine landscape painting with birch trees and wildflowers by American artist Ernest Parton (1845-1933). Parton was born in Hudson, New York, and in his teenage years, began to accom...

Charles William Wyllie. English ( b.1853 - d.1923 ). The Upper Pool, River Thames, London. Oil On Canvas. Signed Lower Left. Image size 17.3 inches x 31.5 inches ( 44cm x 80cm ). Fra...

Hand signed, dated and titled verso Jay Milder (born 1934) is an American artist and a figurative expressionist painter of the second generation New York School. Old Testament themes such as Jacob's Ladder and Noah’s Ark, and the Jewish mystical beliefs of the Kabbalah, are recurring themes in Milder’s paintings which are presented as archetypal images that recur in the basic karma, make-up and need of human nature. Internationally exhibited, Milder is included in the collections of many national and international museums. He has been the subject of two, recent retrospectives in Brazil in 2007 at the National Museum Brasilia and, in 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, in Rio de Janeiro. He is renowned in Sao Paulo, one of the major international centers for street and public art, as a seminal influence on graffiti artists. Jay Milder was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1934. His grandparents, who came from the 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. In 1954 Milder visited Europe where he studied painting with André L’Hote, and sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. He spent much time studying at the Louvre Museum, and at the studio of Stanley Hayter. During his Paris years the paintings of the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine, primarily influenced him. Milder returned to the United States in 1956, and he began studying painting at the Chicago Art Institute. He exhibited with the Momentum Group, an alliance of artists who were particularly dedicated to the progression of figurative art and its global origins. In 1957, Milder spent the summer in Mexico for a summer where he exhibited in Puebla. That year he received the Mexican Government’s Honor Award for artists. In the summer of 1958, Milder studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He exhibited his work at the Sun Gallery, with his contemporaries, including Mary Frank, Red Grooms, Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Emilio Cruz and Alex Katz, among others. During this period his painting began to incorporate iconography of birds, animals, humans and animal/human hybrids. In 1958, Milder, Bob Thompson and Red Grooms, founded the City Gallery in the Chelsea section of New York City. The gallery moved downtown and became the Delancey Street Museum and an early site for ‘Happenings’,which Milder participated in. He showed his first major series called Subway Runners in 1960 at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. Milder began a group of smaller paintings, entitled “Messiah Series”, in the late 1960s. These were fully expressionistic earth toned pictures, and he completed around 250 paintings in the series, based on biblical themes from the Old Testament. When 40 of these paintings were shown in a traveling exhibition premiering at the Richard Green Gallery in New York City, in 1987, art critic Donald Kuspit wrote in ArtForum Magazine: “after Nolde’s biblical pictures, these are the best and most integral group of biblical pictures in the 20th century.” 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. From the 1970s to today, much of Milder's artworks have been centered around interpretations and the visual energy of the Kabbalah. 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 Sao Paulo. Jay Milder’s paintings have undergone various stylistic changes since the 1950s. However 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. For Milder 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. Jay Milder's work is in the permanent collection of many 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, and the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. He has been awarded 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 America and Brazil at Belles Artes Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jay Milder American Figurative Expressionist Painter of the Second Generation New York School Jay Milder (1934–2026) was an American figurative expressionist painter associated with the second generation of the New York School. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Milder drew on a deep well of influences — from Hasidic mysticism and the Kabbalah to the jazz clubs of North Omaha and the painterly traditions of European modernism — to forge a body of work centered on archetypal, biblically rooted imagery, most notably Jacob's Ladder and Noah's Ark. Early Training and European Influence In the early 1950s, Milder traveled to Paris to study at La Grande Chaumière and the Sorbonne, taking painting classes with André Lhote and sculpture instruction with Ossip Zadkine. There he encountered the work of Chaim Soutine, whose expressive, gestural approach to form left a lasting imprint on Milder's painterly style. He returned to the United States in 1956 and continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was introduced to Hans Hofmann's push/pull compositional theory — a foundational concept of Abstract Expressionism. New York School and the City Gallery In 1958, Milder co-founded the artist-run City Gallery in a shared Flatiron District loft with Red Grooms, giving early exhibition space to artists including Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. Alongside contemporaries Bob Thompson, Lester Johnson, Emilio Cruz, and Alex Katz, Milder exhibited at the influential Sun Gallery, developing a figurative vocabulary populated by birds, animals, and human/animal hybrid forms. His breakthrough "Subway Runners" series debuted at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1964 — dense, impasto oil paintings depicting commuters in motion through the city's transit system. Rhino Horn and Mature Style During the 1970s, Milder co-founded the Rhino Horn collective alongside Peter Passuntino, Peter Dean, Benny Andrews, and others, furthering a commitment to figurative expressionism against the prevailing tides of Minimalism and Pop Art. Throughout his career, biblical and Kabbalistic themes remained central to his practice, which art historian George Nelson Preston described as "trance-like" in a 1976 Arts magazine profile. Museum Collections and Legacy Milder's work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among others. He was the subject of major retrospectives in Brazil, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (2006) and the National Museum, Brasília (2007), and in 2009 painted a commissioned mural in São Paulo alongside Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra. He is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery, which mounted the solo exhibition Jay Milder: Broadway Nonstop, Subway Paintings from the 1950s and '60s in 2022. Milder died on May 27, 2026, at the age of 92, leaving behind a singular body of work bridging Abstract Expressionism, Jewish mysticism, and the raw energy of postwar New York City. Keywords: Jay Milder, figurative expressionism, second generation New York School, Subway Runners series, Kabbalah painting...