Joe Lasker was born in 1919, graduated from the Cooper Union Art School in New York in 1939 and resides in South Norwalk, Conn. Between 1951 and 2003 he had 14 one-man shows at New York’s Kraushaar Galleries. Reviewing the first, Art News commented on his “pictures that veil social commentary within a romantic realism.”

As a young artist disenchanted by abstract expressionism, he participated with like-minded colleagues such as Edward Hopper in Reality, a polemical magazine that argued against non-representational art. “I feel that much of American art of the last 50 years has something missing, namely narrative,” Lasker says. “Without narrative there would be little left of the art of the Old Masters, of 20th-century expressionism and surrealism. There would be no Guernica by Picasso and little left of his prints.”

“There is a psychological warmth and penetration in the work… especially stimulating canvasses… marvelously effective... a tour de force,” proclaimed The New York Times in reviews from 1947 to 74. “Extraordinary technique, engaging wit…Lasker’s riffs on art history, life, and convention are delivered with refreshing charm, irony, and skill,” wrote Mary Schneider Enriquez in Art News, January, 2004.

His works repose in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Baltimore Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, Tel Aviv Museum and other museums.

Corporate-collection representation includes Aramark, First National Bank of Chicago, 3M, Upjohn Pharmaceuticals and U.S. embassies in Tokyo and Harare.

His many prizes include Prix de Rome and Guggenheim Fellowships and numerous awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Academy of Design (where he is a National Academician and the former Secretary).

He has been written about in Life, New Yorker and Parade magazines; American Art of Our Century (Lloyd Goodrich and John I. Baur, New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art), The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art (Patricia Hills and Roberta Tarbell, Newark: University of Delaware Press), Chagall to Kitai (Avram Kampf, London: Barbican Art Gallery) and other publications.

The artist has written and illustrated many children’s books, including the prize-winning Merry Ever After and The Boy Who Loved Music, both published by Viking Press.

He is currently represented in Canada by Toronto’s Liss Gallery, www.lissgallery.com.

For more information and a wide-ranging portfolio of his cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, fantasies, interiors, seascapes and still lifes (as well as portraits of him by prominent artists and longtime friends Alice Neel, Raphael Soyer and Charles Reid), please see his Web site, www.joelasker.com, or contact joelaskerart@sympatico.ca, 416-469-0849.