Alexander Oscar Levy (American, 1881-1947) "On King's Highway"

Alexander Oscar Levy (American, 1881-1947)
Born in Bonn, Germany, Alexander Oscar Levy emigrated to Cincinnati at the age of three and trained at the Cincinnati Art Academy under Frank Duveneck before continuing his studies at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art with William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Ossip Linde. In 1909, he settled in Buffalo, New York, where he would remain for the rest of his life, serving as art director of the Larkin Company from 1913 to 1925 while contributing illustrations to The Saturday Evening Post, Saint Nicholas Magazine, and The Century.
Levy emerged as one of the few American painters working in a sustained Art Deco idiom, producing society portraits, allegorical figural compositions, market scenes, and brooding landscapes distinguished by a decorative use of color and a formal seriousness extended equally to imperious matrons and laboring women. The New York critic Peyton Boswell praised him as "a fantasist, expressing visions that originate in his brain and are free of natural encumbrances."
His work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Albright Art Gallery, and entered the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Denver Art Museum, among others. A staunch traditionalist whose public opposition to modernism placed him outside the prevailing currents of mid-century American art, Levy was the subject of a major retrospective, Alexander O. Levy: American Artist, Art Deco Painter, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, in 2014-2015, which has anchored a sustained reappraisal of his reputation.