About the artist:

Born in 1901, Benjamin Greenstein Benno was regarded as an artistic prodigy from a young age. After living in Russia for a short time after the death of his mother in 1905, Benno and his father relocated to New York where he was quickly enrolled in the Ferrer Modern School at the young age of eleven. After studying for several years at the progressive school, Benno moved to Paris in 1926 but returned to New York only a few years later in 1931. Upon receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship, Benno immediately returned to Paris and remained there until 1939. While in Paris, Benno became affiliated with the international avant garde movement and associated with famed European avant gardists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, and Pablo Picasso, among many others. Upon the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Benno fled to New York with many exiled artists, where his former fame and artistic style was now received with criticism and distaste. Shocked and perturbed, the artist reacted poorly to the criticism and his emotional presence throughout the fine arts dwindled as he aged. In his later years, he continued to work and produced a number of prolific pieces that once again signified his artistic genius and imaginative mind. While his career followed a nontraditional trajectory different than that of other world-class artists, Benno's artistry defines the era in which he worked and reflects the profound influences of the other Modern artists with whom he worked during the early 20th century. Shop our selection of Benno's cubist paintings for sale online.