Joseph Raffael (born February 22, 1933 – July 12, 2021)
Early life
Raffael was born on February 22, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York.
He was the youngest of three children and the only son of Sicilian and Swiss-Irish parents, Joseph Marino Raffaele and Cora Kaelin Raffaele.
He became interested in drawing at age 7, and during high school years took classes at the
Brooklyn Museum.
From 1953–54, he attended
Cooper Union. In the summer of 1954 he studied with Joseph Albers at the Yale Summer School, then attended
Yale University where he received his BFA in 1956.
Career
In 1958, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study for two years in
Florence and
Rome, and began painting complexly colored watercolors of flower forms. He mounted his first New York City exhibition of his Umbrian watercolors in 1963, at the d’Arcy Galleries, while at the same time battling
hepatitis from which he almost died; when he recovered, he shifted to "real life" images based on photographs.
Raffael’s work received critical praise beginning in the mid-1960s. In 1965, Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery held a one-person show of his work. In 1972, using photographs of rivers taken by the artist William Allan, he began to produce his "water painting".
In 1973 Time Magazine published an article by Robert Hughes A Slice of the River, describing his water paintings.
In 2018, Raffael collaborated with David Pagel to produce Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity. In a review of the book in the San Francisco Review of Books, it was written that, "...the joy of this book is slowly reading the interchange of ideas form the exchanged emails between these two men – comments on life, death, art and artists, writing, creativity, children, pets – all blended into a wondrous tapestry of the essence of being truly alive."
Personal life
On May 19, 2019 his wife Lannis Wood Raffael died after a long period of health crises. Before her death, Raffael completed his painting "For Lannis: 1944–2019".
Raffael died in Cagnes-sur-Mer at the age of 88 on July 12, 2021.
Awards
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1974 First Prize, Tokyo International Biennial, Japan
-
1960 Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship
-
1958 Fulbright Fellowship
Collections
Joseph Raffael’s paintings are in the collections of nearly 50 museums, private and public institutions, including the Oakland Museum of California,
the Art Institute of Chicago,
the
Whitney Museum,
among other institutions.
Selected publications
Books
Raffael, Joseph; Pagel, David; Erlanson, Amanda (ed.).
Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel About Art, Love, Death, and Creativity (Zero+ Publishing, 2018);
Goodman, Lanie; Dillard Stroud, Betsy; Pagel, David. Moving Toward the Light: Joseph Raffael (ACC Editions, 2015);
Wallach, Amei; Kuspit, Donald. Reflections of Nature, Paintings by Joseph Raffael (Abbeyville Press, 1998);
Arthur, John. Realists at Work: Studio Interviews and Working Methods of Ten Leading Contemporary Painters (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1983);
Further reading
External links
