About the artist:

George Habergritz was an American Abstract Expressionist artist who lived and was active in New York throughout his career. He was best known for his work in abstraction through painting, sculpture, and collage.

A painter and sculptor, George Habergritz was active in New York City as the Director of the School of Continuing Art Education from 1968, an instructor at the Art Students League, and a lecturer on artists in Africa, the South Pacific, and India. He studied in New York at the National Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and in Paris at the Academy Grande Chaumiere. From 1963 to 1964, he was President of the National Society of Painters Casein. His work can be found at Wilberforce University in Ohio; the Safad Museum in Israel, and the Jewish Museum in London.

Note to AskART from Kenneth Young:

For a wedding present, he gave my wife and I a stack of sketches from his African tour and sketches of an early Coney Island. He told of cafe days in Paris hanging with some greats---of pocket pencil sketch races with Picasso of whom Habergritz said, "the little jerk really couldn't draw for shit. He told many stories: Cafe days with Picasso, African adventures, Coney Island street dreams. His was a thin thread weaving through a rich time full with an intensity of artists. And he touched them all. In Paris before WWII he escaped the Nazi sympathies returning to NYC and did not begin his travels again until after the war. When I last dropped in on him, he was still filling sketchbooks full with intense abstractions that melded into form. Mostly brooding, always human. Nice guy. . . .He died in 1998, maybe 1997.