The Artistic Voice of Seymour Fogel

Seymour Fogel was born in New York City in 1911. His early artistic talent earned him a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. Upon graduation he set out to find his own artistic voice. It would result in an astonishingly prolific career that would span decades of social and cultural change.

Fogel’s art was not limited to one style. During the 1930s and 1940s, his Social Realist Period, he worked with Diego Rivera, Phillip Guston and Ben Shahn on murals of national importance. These included the controversial Rockefeller Center mural, the 1939 New York World’s Fair murals and the Social Security Administration Building murals in Washington, D.C. While riding the freight trains through Depression era America, Fogel produced drawings of disenfranchised and downtrodden people affected by the poverty of the times.

During WW II, Fogel’s war posters won awards. Deliver Us From Evil was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and distributed throughout the country as a postal stamp and magazine cover. Fogel's social realist drawings and paintings have found their way into important institutional collections, including those at the National Portrait Gallery, Greenville County Museum of Art, Odgen Museum of Southern Art and Telfair Museum of Art.

In the 1940s, Fogel moved to Texas to join the art faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. Soon after the move, Fogel turned to making abstract art. During this Texas Modernist Period, Fogel’s art attracted attention both inside and outside the state. His walls were lined with awards and prizes. His work was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His paintings were sold through prestigious galleries, including Duveen Graham Gallery, Mortimer Levitt Gallery and M. Knoedler & Co.

In the 1960s, Fogel returned to New York City. During this New York Exploratory Period, Fogel mastered the use of unexpected materials such as glass, sand and wax. He advanced his interest in architecture, produced sculpture and was elected to the International Fine Arts Council, the International Institute of Arts & Letters and the Architectural League of New York.


During the 1960s and 1970s, Fogel turned to a transcendental form of art he termed “atavistic.” By this he implied the art was a pure, nonrational, elemental form of visual communication. During this New York Transcendental Period and Connecticut Transcendental Period, Fogel produced meticulous pencil line drawings, newsprint collages, acrylic color flow paintings, conte-crayon woodland drawings, three-dimensional wood constructions and large sentinel paintings.

In the early 1980s, Fogel continued to produce art in his Westport, Connecticut, studio every day. Museums and galleries continued to show his current and past work. Fogel died in 1984. His last painting, still wet on the easel, was Convergence: a form rises up from below to be met by a form descending from above, the instant of the mortal merging with the infinite.  

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