Stanley Meltzoff, Avid Diver Who Painted Marine Life, 89
DGH
Stanley Meltzoff, who dived to great depths to photograph sea life and
then, in his studio, transformed those images into vibrant paintings
for magazines like Sports Illustrated and Scientific American, died
Thursday, November 9, 2006, in Red Bank, New Jersey, having lived in
Fair Haven, New Jersey, at the age f 89.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Diane Pogrant.
Wandering the world for more than 40 years - from the shores of
Montauk and Key West to the atolls of the Pacific and the Mediterranean
coast - Mr. Meltzoff spent his days peering at bonefish as they mated
six inches below the surface or using scuba gear to photograph sharks,
eels or goliath groupers at depths of 100 feet or more.
An artist and art professor earlier in his life, he began to
concentrate on fish images in the early 1960s.
In "Bound for Blue Water: Contemporary American Marine Art"
(Greenwich Workshop Press, 2003), the marine art historian J. Russell
Jinishian called Mr. Meltzoff "the father and founder of the
genre."
"To say that water is in Stanley Meltzoff's blood is an
understatement," the book said. It also displayed Mr. Meltzoff's
detailed depictions of butterfish, bluefin tuna, black marlin, bonefish
and barracuda - to name a few - in shades of red, green, orange,
purple, silver and, of course, blue.
Mr. Meltzoff roamed "in search of many species of fish that he
studied, photographed and interacted with in their natural
environments," Mr. Jinishian said. "He then put his masterful
brushwork on canvas to create images that, for the most part, are the
only way these beautiful animals can be seen."
Born in Harlem on March 27, 1917, Mr. Meltzoff was a son of Nathan and
Sadie Marcus Meltzoff. His father was a cantor at a Manhattan
synagogue. Mr. Meltzoff graduated from City College in 1937 and earned
a master's degree in fine art from New York University in 1940.
During World War II, he was an artist for Stars and Stripes, the
military newspaper, in Europe. He taught painting and art history at
City College from 1939 to 1941, and taught there again after the war
until 1950, when he began a five-year stint at Pratt Institute.
But even as a child in the 1920s, Mr. Meltzoff had been an avid skin
diver, mainly off the New Jersey coast. By the 1940s, he was keen on
spear fishing and scuba diving and, starting in 1949, he added
underwater photography. He first combined his passions for the sea,
photography and art in the 1960s, when he painted several series on
particular fish species for Sports Illustrated, National Geographic and
Field & Stream.
Mr. Meltzoff's first wife, Alice Forder Meltzoff, died in 1979.
Besides his second wife, whom he married in 1999, he is survived by two
daughters, Sarah Keene Meltzoff of Miami and Annie Laurie Armistead of
Davis, Calif.; three stepchildren, Jessie Dulberger of Boulder, Colo.,
Stephanie Ritz of Oshkosh, Wis., and Matt Ritz of Tacoma, Wash.; and a
brother, Julian, of San Diego.
Mr. Meltzoff's art was not been limited to marine life. He did
illustrations, including landscapes and historical subjects, for Life,
The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. In 1976, he was commissioned by
AT&T to paint a whimsical telephone book cover celebrating the
nation's bicentennial and the company's centennial. The cover, on
187 million phone books distributed nationwide, included an American
Indian bewildered by smoke signals rising from a telephone receiver.
But Mr. Meltzoff always returned to the sea, "a place without
horizons," he once wrote, where he could dive "through the surface
into the looking-glass world where I flew down into the deeper blue,
until I fell back up into the air, exhausted with delight."
NY Times -- DENNIS HEVESI