The Little-Known Legacy of American Modern Master Seymour Fogel
A student at the prestigious National Design Academy, and a member
of the legendary Art Students League, Seymour Fogel left school in 1933 and
pursued an apprenticeship with Diego Rivera. The Mexican muralist was working
on a major mural in Rockefeller Center, and Fogel joined the project as an
assistant; the notorious mural, Man at the Crossroads, was destroyed
shortly after its unveiling due to its blatant political allusions. Cutting his
teeth in a polemical atmosphere where art infiltrated politics, Fogel left the
experience well-versed in the language of Social Realism and the
intricacies of large-scale mural making, both of which would lead him to an
accomplished artistic career grounded in the Depression era. The native New
Yorker went on to garner over 20 historic mural commissions from the WPA’s
Federal Art Project, which led him across the United States.
Fogel’s story—including stints working alongside major modernists
like Philip
Guston and Ben Shahn—has been
described as “a ‘who’s who’ in midcentury American art.” Unlike many of his
Social Realist contemporaries, Fogel ventured beyond figuration and
experimented with style and material. Following the end of the Depression he
moved to Texas where he was a professor at the University of Texas in Austin,
and pursued his own career through investigations into regionalist themes,
Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism, ultimately developing his own variety of
abstraction. While his murals were mostly figurative, highly accomplished and
vibrant visions of labor and economic recovery, Fogel’s abstract works range
from energetic constellations of line and shape, to carefully balanced
dialogues on color and form.
Although Fogel never became a household name, his success is
recognized today through a long career of achievement. The artist himself once
said, “The real success in a truly creative man’s world is the awareness that
comes in time that his road is the right one for him, that his search will
never yield anything but a little series of truths that give him, however
briefly, a glimpse into something incomprehensible but grand; something cosmic
that he, in his small way, has been able to touch.”
