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Henry Albert Botkin
Born in Boston in 1896, Henry Botkin studied at the Art Students League in New York City. He was an abstract painter who served from 1957 to 1961 as President of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. In 1935, he visited Charleston, where he painted Lowcountry blacks in a romantic manner that some criticized for lacking social realism. He was hosted by his cousin and close companion, George Gershwin, who was in Charleston with DuBose Heyward at Folly Beach setting his novel "Porgy" to music. Botkin was Gershwin's painting teacher, and Gershwin collected many of Botkin's paintings which people said corresponded in mood to Gershwin's music. Botkin also acted as an art advisor to Ira and George Gershwin, traveling to Paris to buy works for them and for their friends including William Paley, and Fanny Brice. By the late 1940s he had turned to abstraction in oils and collage. Henry Botkin exhibited extensively during his lifetime, and his work is represented in the permanent collections of numerous major institutions around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Bath-Yam Museum of Art, Israel. Botkin died in 1983 in New York City.

Sold works:

African American Couple