DISCLAIMER: Biography courtesy of www.leoraiken.com
Leo Raiken (1914-1972) was a realist and abstract artist who drew and painted the spirit, presence and radical changes of Depression Era America and the human and community changes pre and post WWII New York, Brooklyn, Long Island, and New England. From the struggles of the Depression, the fight against Fascism and the expansive affluence of a growing Middle Class in post WWII urban and suburban America, Raiken’s expressionist realism and abstract expressionism captured the dynamism and contradictions of American culture and his own perspective, what philosopher of art, Leo Bronstein called, Raiken’s fluid and lyrical “inner landscape.”
Raiken received his art training at the Art Student’s League, Ohio State University, Pratt Institute, a workshop at Black Mountain College, and as a student of Hans Hofmann. He exhibited widely throughout the East Coast of the United States with one-man shows in New York, Brandeis University, New York University and through his dealer, Vera Lazuk, in New York, Paris, and Marseilles, France. In addition, he exhibited at Ohio State University, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Vendome Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, Hofstra University, Long Island University, Brandeis and New York Universities and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.
His early work for the completed mural “Stone Quarry,” which now hangs In the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, Florida was shown at the New York World’s Fair Exhibition of Contemporary American Art in 1939. His first painting of “Pieta Madrid” was Awarded Honorable Mention at the Artists for Victory Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1942. Leo Raiken was an exhibiting member of New York Artist’s Equity, the Long Island Professional Artists Guild and taught Drawing and Painting workshops at Hofstra University, Long Island University, and Brandeis University.
His paintings are in private and public collections in the United States as well as Paris and Marseilles from exhibits installed in France by his dealer, Vera Lazuk. Raiken’s paintings are also in the collections of Brandeis and New York Universities.
