Oil on canvas, circa 1940-45. 305x405 mm; 12 1/4x16 inches. Signed in oil, lower right, and countersigned in oil, lower left, and countersigned in oil, verso.
Provenance: Private collection, Chicago.
Rattner (1895-1978) was born in Poughkeepsie, New York to a Russian-Jewish father and a Romanian-Jewish mother. He initially intended to be an architect, attending George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Deciding instead to concentrate on painting, he then went on to study art at the Corcoran School of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After college, he served in the U.S. Army's American Camouflage Corps (his unit's commanding officer was Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens). Following the war, Rattner lived in Paris from 1920 to 1940, absorbing the influence of both the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, as well as contemporaries including Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault. This early abstract work by Rattner, one of a handful of American artists who worked in Paris at the time and bridged early 20th century modernist European movements such as Cubism with mid-century American Abstract Expressionism, was likely made in Paris or soon after his return to New York in the early 1940s. Rattner also taught fine art at , including The New School, New York (1947–55), and Yale University, New Haven (1952–53).
