Jack Perlmutter; artist & printmaker
Hyfler/Rosner
May 14, 2006 Sunday
Matt Schudel
Artist, Printmaker Jack Perlmutter, 86
http://vesuvius.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/shuttle94.GIF
http://www.umuc.edu/art/doris_patz/pg1_new.html
http://www.askart.com/askart/p/jack_perlmutter/jack_perlmutter.aspx
Jack Perlmutter, 86, a Washington artist who portrayed
vibrant scenes of action and movement in his semi-abstract
paintings and prints, died May 4 at Suburban Hospital. A
longtime District resident, he had lived for the past three
years at Maplewood Park Place retirement home in Bethesda.
Mr. Perlmutter, who was self-taught, was one of Washington's
best-known artists from the 1940s to the 1980s. Born in New
York, he had a love of urban life, which was reflected in
his bold, energetic and colorful works.
In the 1950s, he called himself an abstract realist, as he
combined two seemingly irreconcilable artistic styles. His
works were typically built around recognizable urban scenes,
such as railroad tracks, milling crowds, buildings or
bridges, overlaid with busy linear forms, often in bright
colors.
"The paintings are full of raw color and jagged lines,"
Washington Post critic Leslie Judd Portner wrote in 1956.
"They are so complex in their organization, so overbusy,
that they hit the eye like broken glass. And yet you feel
the artist's excitement, his love of the rawness, the
newness, the beautiful, exciting, crushing city."
A yearlong visit to Japan as a Fulbright scholar in 1959-60
introduced Mr. Perlmutter to new printmaking techniques, and
he began to incorporate elements of Japanese design into his
work.
He taught printmaking at the Corcoran College of Art and
Design from 1960 to 1982, and he was commissioned by NASA to
portray Apollo and space shuttle missions in the 1970s and
1980s. His work can be found in dozens of museums, including
the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran Gallery of Art
and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr. Perlmutter was born in New York on Jan. 23, 1920, grew
up in the Bronx and had an early interest in art, but other
facts of his life appear to have been embellished with a
touch of artistic license.
In his résumé, Mr. Perlmutter said he had master's and
doctoral degrees in fine arts. He told one reporter that he
worked his way through New York University, planning to be a
doctor. One article claimed that he was a close friend of
Andy Warhol's and that the influential art critic Clement
Greenberg would not speak with Mr. Perlmutter after he
refused to join the popular Washington Color School of
painting in the early 1960s.
As far as can be determined, all of these statements are
false.
According to his daughters and Washington Post stories from
the 1950s, Mr. Perlmutter moved to Washington no later than
1940 and took a job in the Navy's Hydrographic Office -- now
the Naval Oceanographic Office -- as a lithographer. He
learned the complicated art of lithography by drawing and
printing nautical charts. He never attended college.
He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and stayed in
Washington, working at the Hydrographic Office. In 1947,
when some of his prints were displayed at the Anacostia
branch of the D.C. Public Library, a Washington Post article
said he "has been painting and exhibiting in Washington for
about six years." At the peak of his career in the 1950s and
1960s, he was represented by galleries in New York,
Washington, Japan and Europe.
Mr. Perlmutter continued to work as a civilian with the Navy
until 1959, when he went to Japan on a Fulbright scholarship
to study printmaking and to lecture on American art. From
1951 to 1968, he was on the faculty of the old Wilson
Teachers College in the District, and he also served as an
art curator at the Cosmos Club. He often walked around the
city, taking photographs -- which he developed himself -- of
urban scenes for his paintings and prints.
His wife, Norma Mazo Perlmutter, was also an artist, and for
several years in the 1950s they operated a greeting-card
business from the basement of their home, designing and
printing the cards themselves. His wife suggested the
"Studio Days" open houses, for which Mr. Perlmutter became
known later in his career.
Their daughters said she also co-wrote some of the articles
that appeared under her husband's name in art journals. They
were divorced in 1994, after 51 years of marriage. Norma
Perlmutter died in 2001.
Survivors include two daughters, Judith Means of Bethesda
and Ellen Mazo of Pittsburgh; and two grandsons.
A 1956 Washington Post article described Mr. Perlmutter as
"a man of tremendous vitality, with the kind of alert,
inquiring mind that extends the frontiers of the creative
process," and he remained an active artist well into his
eighties. When he vacated his townhouse three years ago, he
donated dozens of his works to Hood College in Frederick,
the Washington County Museum of Art in Hagerstown, Md., St.
John's College in Annapolis and the Cosmos Club.