Thomas Eldred New York, Michigan (1903 - 1993) abstract, 1942 gouache on paper Signed and dated lower right. Provenance: From the artist's estate Biography from the Archives of askART: Thomas Eldred was born in Climax, Michigan in 1903. He had an early interest in art and would doodle on the walls as a child. He studied Economics at Kalamazoo College because there was no art program at the time. Nevertheless, he put together an impressive portfolio and entered the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. His appetite for art increased and he hitchhiked to New York and attended the Art Student's League. Like many aspiring artists of the 1920's and 1930's, Thomas Eldred studied in New York at the Art Students League with the famous Thomas Hart Benton and Guy Pene DuBois. Eldred called Benton "a good teacher whom I liked personally." During the 1930's, Eldred's career as an artist progressed. He declined invitation to the famous artist's colony, Yaddo, for financial reasons and instead took a teaching position, funded by the WPA program, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In Brooklyn, Eldred met Werner Drewes, one of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists group. During these years, the Guggenheims acquired his work for their new Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Guggenheim Museum). He traveled to Paris and studied with William Stanley Hayter in his influential printmaking workshop, Atelier 17, along with Chagall, Jaques Lipchitz, Miro and Matta. In 1940, Hayter opened a school in the United States, where Eldred joined him again, along with such artists as Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson and Jackson Pollock. During the 1930's & 1940's, Eldred produced a skillful body of work, and much of it illustrates the complex position of modernist abstraction at this time. Eldred's art, engaging directly or flirting with abstraction, was eclectic. It reveals the impact of a myriad of major artists: Arp, Braque, Feininger, Kandinsky, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. His work can resemble that of the American artist associated with the American Abstract Artists group. It can have the structure of modern geometric abstraction or the fluidity of biomorphism. Frequently both elements cohabit his work. 11 1/4"H 16 3/4"W(sight), 16 1/4"H 21 1/4"W(frame)