Irving Petlin

Irving Petlin (December 17, 1934–September 1, 2018) was an American painter born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, who spent much of his life moving between the United States and Europe while developing a body of work that placed moral urgency at the center of visual art. He earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956 and an MFA from Yale University in 1960, where he studied under Josef Albers. His practice encompassed oil painting, pastel, and printmaking, and his work engaged persistently with themes of war, exile, historical memory, and ethical responsibility — concerns that shaped both his imagery and his public activism across several decades.

Petlin's political commitments found early and lasting form in collaborative projects. He was among the artists who worked alongside Mark di Suvero on the Los Angeles Peace Tower in 1966, one of the most significant public antiwar gestures of its era. The following year he contributed Skin (1967), a lithograph published by Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, now held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1970, he co-created Q. And babies? A. And babies. with Jon Hendricks, Frazer Dougherty, Ronald L. Haeberle, and Emilio Ambasz — a protest poster that entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and became one of the defining graphic works of the Vietnam War period. These projects were not peripheral to his studio practice but continuous with it: the same preoccupations with violence, witness, and historical reckoning that animated his activism ran through his paintings and pastels for the rest of his life. The Disappeared (1985), held by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Self-Portrait as a Young Man (1981), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exemplify the psychological and political density of his mature work, while The Entry of Christ into Washington (2005), a tripartite canvas approximately five by twelve feet, demonstrates the monumental scale he could bring to religious and political allegory.

In his later decades, Petlin worked extensively in pastel — a medium he treated with the same seriousness as oil — and developed recurring subjects through serial form, as in The Photographer No. 6 (1991) and the 2016 pastel Aleppo "The Music Room", which fused musical, architectural, and geopolitical associations into a single image. Musical structure also informed his painting: Fugue (Paris Is White) (2011) and Fugue No. 18, J. S. Bach (2011) translate the logic of counterpoint into visual repetition and layering. His work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and his papers are preserved at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Exhibition venues across his career included Kent Fine Art and Kent Gallery in New York, Galerie Jan Krugier in Geneva, Galerie Thessa Herold and Galerie Jacques Leegenhoek in Paris, and Galerie Ditesheim & Maffei Fine Art in Neuchâtel and Geneva, which has continued to present his work in the years since his death. He died on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where he had maintained a studio.