Harold Shapinsky, Abstract Painter, 78

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Harold Shapinsky, an abstract expressionist painter whose life was
defined by artistic obscurity and financial insecurity until his
"discovery" in the mid-1980s, died January 31, 2004, at the
Collingswood Nursing Home in Rockville, Maryland, suffering from
Alzheimer's disease, at the age of 78.

Mr. Shapinsky owed much of his latter-day publicity to Akumal
Ramachander, an English teacher and art connoisseur from India. After
forming a friendship with Mr. Shapinsky's son, Ramachander saw slides
of Mr. Shapinsky's artwork and became convinced that the artist had
been unjustly overlooked by the art establishment. He began a crusade
to win recognition for the aging artist, who favored vibrant, dancing
strokes.

After resistance from New York galleries, Ramachander used connections
in London, England, to persuade James Mayor to give the artist a show
at his gallery. Reportedly, 19 of the 20 painting sold for prices
ranging from $12,000 to $30,000. Mr. Shapinsky was profiled by
Britain's Channel 4, by novelist Salman Rushdie in a British newspaper
and by Lawrence Weschler in the New Yorker magazine.

Further exhibits followed at the famed Tate Gallery in London and
elsewhere in Europe, followed by a 1992 retrospective at the National
Arts Club in New York, New York.

His shows drew huge crowds, and reviewers were often mixed in their
response. At the least, many used his work to reevaluate a school of
painting whose main practitioners had long ceased producing.

Mr. Shapinsky was described as a modest man who had long ago resigned
himself to critical oblivion. He was, to say the least, restrained in
his reaction to the sudden attention. It was all "marvelous," he told
The Washington Post. "Very marvelous."

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian-Jewish immigrants. His
father worked in the garment business, and his mother was a
self-taught pianist. He said there was little familial support for the
fine arts; a painter was consider a "bum" in his household.
Nevertheless, he gravitated to the world of patterns and designs that
he first saw in the swaths of fabric his father brought home.

He disliked formal art-class drawing exercises, much preferring the
surreal abstract expressionist work of Arshile Gorky. He left school
and home as a teenager to make his way as an artist and made his
redoubt an all-night cafeteria where Willem de Kooning and others hung
out. "We could talk, have coffee, sometimes draw on napkins," he told
The Post.

In an oral history, he said his first "real break" was winning a
scholarship to study at an informal loft-school, called the Subjects
of the Artist, where teachers included Robert Motherwell, William
Baziotes, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. He said Motherwell was
pleased to see him scraping away at his canvas in apparent
dissatisfaction -- an example of painting as a process.

In 1950, Mr. Shapinsky's work was included among that of other new
artists at the Kootz Gallery in New York. Then came a long dry spell.
He did house-painting work, sold rare art books to colleges and
universities and helped his second wife, a modern dancer, in her
multimedia workshop for children.

Throughout, he never wavered from his devotion to abstract
expressionism but had to wait until Ramachander's all-consuming regard
before becoming a figure of public interest.

He moved to the Washington area from New York about three years ago
and lived at the nursing home.

His marriage to Miriam Shapinsky ended in divorce.