Hans Burkhardt

Born in Basel, Switzerland, he was the second of three children. Soon, his father left the family for the United States, and thereafter, his mother died of tuberculosis. After early years in a public orphanage, young Hans emigrated to New York in 1924 to seek and live with his father. His early employment was in custom furniture, but his love of art took him to Cooper Union and eventually to the Grand Central School of Art. There, in 1927, he took life drawing and private lessons in painting with the remarkable Arshile Gorky.

It was in 1938 that Burkhardt decided to leave the artistic ferment of New York and venture to California. Though a bitter divorce was at hand, the reasons for his departure remain unclear. However, the desire to develop his own work outside the powerful influence of Gorky and away from the strictures of New York, was a strong motivator. Today, as historians seek to reconnect artists to the Abstract Expressionism, they find in Hans Burkhardt a sincere, hardworking artist. Here was a devoted practitioner, living and working outside the mainstream, who side-stepped regionalism, worked his way through Synthetic Cubism and found long-lasting power in the expressive possibilities of the figure and the still life, and their abstractions.