January 16, 2020
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Nicholas Marsicano (1908 – 1991), American painter and teacher of the New York School, was married to Dancer / Choreagrapher Merle Marsicano. He is survived by his widow, painter Susan Kamen Marsicano.

Marsicano's work was primarily based on the female figure.

"Nicholas Marsicano, who taught painting and drawing at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art for 42 years, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., last Sunday (January 6, 1991). He was 82 years old."

Nicholas Marsicano was born October 1, 1908, Shenandoah, Pennsylvania.

He was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and later was accepted at the nearby Barnes Foundation, along with Ralston Crawford. During his years at the Barnes, Marsicano traveled to Europe and North Africa, Mexico and United States.

Marsicano befriended many artists of his time including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Raoul Hague, Phillip Guston, and others.

During his teaching career, his students included Tom Wesselmann, Eva Hesse, Milton Glaser, Thomas Nozkowski, and more.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1974.

 
 

Jan Müller (December 27, 1922 – January 29, 1958) was a New York Figurative Expressionist of the 1950s. According to Carter Ratcliff, "His paintings usually erect a visual architecture sturdy enough to support an array of standing, riding, levitating figures. Gravity is absent, banished by an indifference to ordinary experience." According to the poet John Ashbery, Müller "brings a medieval sensibility to neo - Expressionist paintings."

Jan Müller was born on December 27, 1922, in Hamburg, Germany. In 1933 his family fled the Nazis to Prague, and later to Bex - les - Bains, Switzerland; there he experienced the first of several attacks of rheumatic fever. He visited Paris in 1938 and two years later was apprehended and interned in a camp near Lyon. Shortly after the fall of Paris Müller was released, at which time he moved to Ornaisons, near Narbonne. Following an unsuccessful attempt to escape to the United States from Marseille, he was able to cross the border into Spain in 1941 and proceed via Portugal to New York.

Jan Müller began to study art in 1945.

  • The Art Students League of New York, New York City, NY for six months;
  • Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts for five years.

He became a US citizen in 1957.

Jan Müller died on January 29, 1958, at the age of thirty - six, in New York.