Burt Hasen, 85, Artist of the Downtown Postwar Scene
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Burt Hasen, who died Friday at 85, was a Paris-trained artist whose widely seen work was tinged with Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.
A long time teacher at the School of Visual Arts, Hasen’s canvases and prints hang in the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Academy of Design .
The son of Eastern European immigrants, Hasen was raised on the Lower East Side. An attraction to color and line ran in the family; his father was a house painter and a cousin, Irwin Hasen, was a DC Comics artist who was the co-creator of the strip “Dondi.” When Burt Hasen was 12, he placed third in the annual Wanamaker Drawing Competition for Greater New York schoolchildren. In his later teens, he studied at the Art Students League.
Hasen served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and was stationed in New Guinea. Visual references his time in the tropics were to be a regular feature of his art in subsequent decades.
After returning to the Art Students League after the war, Hasen went to Paris to study art at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière on the GI Bill. There he ingested large doses of Cubism and Surrealism while living the typical atelier existence. He had his first solo exhibit, in 1950, at Galerie 8 in Paris.
Back in New York, he frequented the Cedar Tavern and the other popular watering holes that were the center of a thriving postwar art scene that produced Abstract Expressionism. Hasen studied with Hans Hofmann, though figurative painting was seldom far from his imaginative output.
A New York Times review of his 1952 show at the Hacker Gallery complimented him for his “lively style” and “good taste,” and added, “in his sputtering pen drawings he turns human beings into gargoyles.” In 1954, he began teaching at the School of Visual Arts; he retired in 2000.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Hasen had frequent solo exhibits at galleries around the city. He won a Fulbright grant to study in Rome in 1959, and in 1964 he was featured in a Time magazine feature on the Whitney’s (then) annual show, which seemed to concur with Hasen’s description of his own oeuvre: “Proustian.”
In his Who’s Who artist’s statement, Hasen wrote, “Each work is a projection of myself into the cosmic universe. This compulsion to paint my fantasy has never faltered or been self-deceptive.” He liked to say Marie Antoinette was his muse, and her image appeared repeatedly in some of his more surreal compositions.
In 1994, he was elected to the National Academy of Design and in 2000 was a winner of the art award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition in 2003 at the Southeast Missouri Regional Museum.
Confined to a wheelchair in recent years, Hasen was involved in a dispute with his landlord over his rent-controlled studio and apartment on Dutch Street, in the financial district. The landlord wanted to evict him and demolish the building.
“How can they be so callous?” Hasen said. “Compared to the masters of finance, artists are like little children. We live in a dream world. They live in the real world, and the real world is cash.”
Burton Stanley Hasen
Born December 19, 1921, in New York City; died September 7 in New York City; survived by his wife, Mary, a stepson, Herb, and a brother, Harvey.