Timeline

1910 - 1926

Moves to Buffalo, New York; works various jobs, including employment as an architectural draftsman; during vacations he travels with his father, a ship’s captain, around the Great Lakes

1926 - 1927

Works as sailor on steamships to Central America, California, and the Caribbean; studies in Los Angeles at Otis Art Institute, 1927; employed as illustrator in Walt Disney’s studio, 1927

1927 - 1930

Studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (under Hugh Breckenridge), and at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania

1930 - 1932

Moves to New York to paint; summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts; receives good reviews by Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times

1932 - 1933

Travels to Paris, Spain and Italy; returns to New York to study at Columbia University

1935 - 1939

Lives and paints in Chadds Ford and Exton, Pennsylvania; subjects of paintings are mostly local barns and industrial images; experiments with photography, which remains a lifetime interest; continues to receive favorable reviews in The New York Times and in the New York Sun

1940 - 1941

Participates in group exhibition A New Realism: Crawford, Demuth, Sheeler, Spencer at the Cincinnati Art Museum; produces paintings, book jackets and book illustrations in New York

1943 - 1945

Serves as master sergeant, chief of the Visual Presentation Unit of the Weather Division in the Army Air Force; assigned to the China-Burma and India theatre; visits Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant in Buffalo, and in ensuing years makes paintings relating to his photographs of the assemblage of airplane wings at the plant; solo exhibition at Downtown Gallery, New York, 1944

1947 - 1950

Teaches and paints in Honolulu, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Minneapolis and Baton Rouge; solo show at Downtown Gallery, New York, 1950

1951 - 1957

Travels in Europe and returns to New York, 1951-52; teaches at New School for Social Research, New York, 1952-57

1954 - 1958

Lives in France; travels to Spain to study Goya’s paintings; major retrospective at Milwaukee Art Center, 1958

1959 - 1961

Travels through Spain and Paris and the United States; appointed consultant to the Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University, New Orleans; included in major exhibition The Precisionist View in American Art at The Walker Art Center, Minnesota, 1961

1962 - 1967

Travels to Greece, France and Egypt to make prints and photographs; visiting artist positions held at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and at the University of Illinois in Champaign

1970 - 1971

Receives award from National Academy of Arts and Letters; travels through Spain and England; solo show at Zabriskie Gallery, New York (and again in 1973 and 1976)

1973 - 1978

Travels include: Europe; Asia; Nepal; Afghanistan; and the South Pacific; dies April 27, 1978, in Houston, Texas; buried in St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans

1906

Born September 25th in Ontario, Canada

1934

First solo exhibition held at the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore

1942

Teaches at the Albright Art School in Buffalo; enlists in the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, US Army

1946

Sent by Fortune to witness atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll to paint his impressions; solo show at Downtown Gallery, New York

1953

Retrospective at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

1954

Solo show at Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York (and again in 1956 and 1958)

1965

Solo exhibition at Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

1968

Retrospective at Creighton University Fine Arts Gallery, Omaha, Nebraska; travels include Guadeloupe, Shelter Islands and Martinique

1969

Lives in New York; solo exhibition at the Century Association, New York (and again in 1978)

1972

Receives award from National Academy of Design, New York