Painting by Henry Botkin, Oskar, c1930
32 inches by 26 inches with frame, 23.5 inches by 17.5 inches without frame

Henry Botkin
(Source: Wiki) Henry Botkin (1896-1983) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and was a mid-century American Modernist who served as President of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors from 1957 to 1961. He was an illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, Harpers, and The Century Magazine. Botkin was a cousin and close friend to composers, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin.

After training at the Massachusetts College of Art, Botkin moved to New York City. He took classes in drawing and illustration at the Art Students League of New York and worked as an illustrator for Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post and Century magazines. In the late 1930s Botkin changed his approach to painting, moving from the School of Paris Modernism that he had adopted after he left Boston. Botkin was known for painting the theater, still lifes, landscapes, and low-country blacks in a romantic manner that some criticized for lacking social realism. By the late 1940s he had turned to abstraction in oils and collage. He grew an interest in collage in the early 1950s, which dominated his work until the 1960s.[2] He served as president of four major art organizations including: The Artists Equity Association, The American Abstract Artists, Group 256 Provincetown, and The Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Botkin helped to organize the first exhibition of American abstract painting at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Japan, in 1955. He also organized the sale of five hundred and forty paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, 1959. Botkin spoke on the radio, “The Voice of America,” television, lead panel discussions throughout the country, and lectured and taught privately in New York, California, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Good condition overall