Stanley Boxer

American, 1926 - 2000

(not assigned)New York, New York, USA

SchoolAbstract Expressionism

BiographyBorn in New York City, Mr. Boxer was natural draftsman but began formal art training only after leaving the Navy at the end of World War II, when his brother persuaded him to take classes at the Art Students League. He was immediately drawn to painting and stayed with it for nearly five decades. A prolific and tireless worker he was in the studio seven days a week, preferred the term "practitioner" to "artist" and routinely rotated his attention among several media, including painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking. Within painting, he explored a variety of styles. At one point he caught the eye of the critic Clement Greenberg, and he was sometimes lumped in with the "colorfield" painters whom Greenberg championed, notably Jules Olitski. But Mr. Boxer himself was adamant in rejecting this stylistic label. Over the years, he remained loyal to the materially dense abstract mode on which his reputation rested.
Mr. Boxer had his first solo exhibition of paintings in New York in 1953. He showed regularly with Tibor de Nagy through 1975, and in that year began an association with Andre Emmerich Gallery that lasted until 1993. At the time of his death he was represented by Salander/O'Reilly Galleries, where a selection of his sculpture was on view last summer.
In 1992, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. organized a career retrospective of Mr. Boxer's work in all media. Traveling retrospectives of his drawings, which are largely figurative, were organized in 1978, and 1991. A one-person show of his paintings appeared at the Butler Institute of Art in Youngstown, Ohio, last year. His work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. (Source:
Holland Cotter, Obituary for Stanley Boxer, published at , Accessed July 7, 2004)

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