Named for U.S. labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, Eugene Roy Witten was born in 1920 in New York City to parents of Jewish ethnicity. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who had been an active anti-Czarist, and his mother gave up a career as a concert pianist to raise her family. Witten, a Francophile painter and periodic resident of France, died on 13 January this year. Nearly all Witten's work has an undercurrent of rapport with nature and a passion for interaction of soft colors with an...

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  Biography of Eugene Roy Witten

  Named for U.S. labor organizer Eugene V. Debs, Eugene Roy Witten was born in 1920 in New York City to parents of Jewish ethnicity. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant who had been an active anti-Czarist, and his mother gave up a career as a concert pianist to raise her family. Witten, a Francophile painter and periodic resident of France, died on 13 January this year. Nearly all Witten's work has an undercurrent of rapport with nature and a passion for interaction of soft colors with an occa-sional bright accent. Since the 1960s most of his paintings were abstract and quite delicate, almost resembling watercolors. After studies in business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a short period in an advertising agency, "Gene" served as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, with tours of duty ranging from Murmansk to Shanghai. On return he was impas-sioned to leave "business" and entered the Art Students League in Manhattan. At the age of 25 he decided his life's work was as an artist. Inspired by the work of the Impressionists, in the late 1940s Witten moved to Paris where he partook in the life of cafes and the Montparnasse student boites, and studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. Awakened to Cezanne, Whistler, Degas and, somewhat later, curious about Seurat, Witten worked in a muted palette overlaying his drawings. Confident and experimenting, Witten returned to Manhattan, dividing his energies between a East Greenwich Village studio and a budding picture-framing business with another former expatriate, Robert Kulicke. In New York, Witten made a few sorties into group shows. During some sejours in the countryside at Woodstock NY, his focus concentrated on an exploration of the landscape. Married to another artist (Anita Witten), the couple sought a refuge for a year (1954-55) near the site of Cezanne's studio in Aix en Provence. This exposure to the Provence landscape was formative and stimulating. This phase produced a large number of blue canvases and landscapes often framed by large, dark pine trees and dotted with red roofs. In 1956 Anita and Gene moved away from New York to find studio space and a respite from the city. In rustic conditions they lived in New Hampshire by Lake Winnepesauke, and then moved to the beautiful Battenkill Valley in Vermont with their two young sons. In 1962 they settled a few kilometers away in the same river valley in adjacent rural New York State. Witten opened a frame shop in a converted garage next to their 1850-era house (which had originally been a haybarn), and later expanded the shop to include a painting studio with a vaulted ceiling, large windows, and a woodstove for warmth. Although most of his paintings done in Shushan were abstract, the local landscape - especially by the riverside - beckoned him back to some stints of landscape painting. Many of these were in winter, with subtle colors of shrubbery and forest against snow. In 1965 he was thunderstruck and enchanted upon seeing Julius Bissier's work for the first time in Bos-ton. Precise contrasts in overlapped silhouettes of mysterious urns stirred him to more investigations in washes. In the period of the 1960s-70s the painter's reputation grew: his works were purchased by private collections (including Francois Mitterand), as well as by Dartmouth College and Boston and N.Y. gallery exhibits. From the 1960s through the 1990s, Witten traveled to France several times as well as England, Sweden, and Holland. In Holland his work was shown in two galleries including Albrecht. Throughout his life as an artist, Gene spurned the « New York Art Scene » and utterly dis-missed the emphasis many contemporary artists placed on « marketing » their art. Celebrated for his subtlety and the transparent washes, Witten developed approaches resembling various traditions that he admired. In 1976, Witten signed a contract with his admirer, collector, and mentor M. Romanet and joined the Galerie that has championed him for these nearly 30 years. It was Gene Witten's will that his ashes be spread on Mt Ste Victoire, and so he will indeed always belong at least partly in France.
  

  

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