Palmer Schoppe Nude Paintings

Signed lower right, 'Palmer Schoppe' (American, 1912-2001) and dated 1966. Displayed in a gilt frame with a water-gilded, silver-gilt liner. Framed dimensions: 27 H x 1.25 D x 23 W inches. Born in Utah, Palmer Schoppe moved with his family to southern California in 1920 and settled in Santa Monica. Artistically inclined and precocious, he began painting as a child. After graduating from UCLA, he spent a year in the Merchant Marines before attending Yale School of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. At the ASL, he was initially drawn to the paintings of Jean Charlot and Thomas Hart Benton but grew increasingly frustrated with their insistence on rigid compositional principles. His native artistic talents prevailed over his lack of formal training, however, and he was promptly employed by both the Chouinard Institute and Walt Disney Studios as a drawing instructor. During this pre-war period, he exhibited with success including at the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939) and with the California Watercolor Society. Outside of his teaching responsibilities, he worked on his personal artistic endeavors and. like many artists of the time, focused primarily on figurative subject matter. Schoppe's early travels in the low country of South Carolina; Harlem, New York and Los Angeles informed his work as he sought to capture the regional life of manual laborers, musicians, circus performers, sun bathers and surfers. Schoppe once stated that, "It seems fairly certain that my work is not 'art about art', but art that is a reaction to a given stimulus. These are 'subject' pictures in that they are definitely in response to a certain place, type of people, cultures and customs". Following his service in World War II, Schoppe returned to teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He became increasingly disillusioned by the changing focus of the art world in the 1950s, when "the' drip' , the' blot', and the' isms' had taken over". He stated that, "it was difficult for the figurative painter to exhibit and I retired from the scene." However, a new artistic outlet presented itself when Schoppe began working as a muralist and architectural sculptor for the architect Aurthur Froelich, who designed race tracks and club houses around the country. This led to a proliferation of mural projects ranging from restaurants to scores of hotels and casinos, such as the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas; Circus-Circus, Las Vegas; the Queen Mary ship...