KEYES

FAY LANSNER

Fay Lansner (1921-2010) was a leading second generation abstract expressionist artist. The daughter of Russian Jews who escaped tsarist Russia and settled in Philadelphia, Lansner began her art education at the Tyler School of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She moved to New York City in 1948 where she studied with Hans Hofmann and at The Art Students League. She married journalist Kermit Lansner, who went on to become editor of Newsweek. Later she studied in Paris under the direction of Fernand Leger and Andre Lhote. She worked for many years in the 10th Street Studio Building and showed at the Hansa, Kornblee and Phoenix Galleries, as well as in the Hamptons with fellow artists including Miriam Shapiro, De Kooning and Larry Rivers.

During the 1950s, the Lansners began to spend summers on the eastern end of Long Island, which had become the summer nexus of the New York Art World. In 1971 they purchased a farmhouse in Bridgehampton, where Fay established another studio. Lansner exhibited extensively,  made many lifelong friends in the Hampton’s and frequently hosted art world neighbors such as Larry Rivers, Perle Fine, Audrey Flack, and critic Harold Rosenberg.

While Lansner was a devoted admirer of abstraction and its tenants as laid down by Hans Hoffman, she knew early on that she wanted to concentrate on the figure. Lansner wanted to do a “Twentieth Century” figure. She set out to develop the language of the body as she could interpret it in twentieth century terms. Lansner stated in a 1976 interview, “ I draw from the model [the figure], and also I don’t draw from the model. I draw from my imagination, from my feeling, from my idea, from sensation, and from the object. Nature. It’s very important to have some sort of model, a reference one can spring to and from.”

 In 1971, Lansner co-founded Women in the Arts (WIA), an organization seeking to change both public and institutional attitudes toward women artists. In 1972, group members demonstrated in front of the Museum of Modern Art protesting discriminatory curatorial practices. The landmark Women Choose Women show of works by 109 women artists opened shortly after the protest at the New York Cultural Center in 1973.

Since her formative studies with Hofmann, abstraction and the figurative have been parallel concerns for the artist in which to paint and draw the human figure.