Arthur

Osver

Arthur Osver was born in Chicago in 1912. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1931-36, and then in 1940 moved to New York, where he would teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and then Columbia University. Osver was associated with Abstract Expressionism, but over the decades his work evolved through periods of urban realism, focusing on smoke stacks, to abstract emphasis on the wisps of smoke, to work with a sense of geometry and restraint. Osver moved to St. Louis in 1960, where he took a professorship at Washington University. He taught in the art program there until 1981. In Missouri, Osver thrived as part of the academic-artistic community at Washington University that had drawn an impressive roster of both professors and students. His work was published and collected widely before his death in 2006. His longtime gallerist, Philip Slein, once said of Osver, “He never stopped working. He lived to paint and painted to live.”