Biography
Arthur Raymond Young (b. New York City, USA 1895 - d. Monterey, California, USA 1989) attended the New York School of Design where his classmate was Norman Rockwell. He was a member of the New York Art Students league and a veteran of the US Army, serving in WW2. Young taught at the Pratt Institute in New York and at the Philadelphia Art Institute before going on to teach many of America’s top artists as Professor at Columbia University, New York, a position he held for 40 years. Some of his students include Stella Lodge LaMond, Edith Mae Brisac and the American abstract artist and writer, Burton Wasserman.
Young’s work was carried by the influential Weyhe Gallery in New York City in the 1920’s and 30’s while Carl Zigrosser was director. The gallery emphasized emerging artists, such as Diego Rivera, Rockwell Kent and Howard Cook and was a prominent institution in the American art world in the first half of the 20th century. The Gallery was referred to as a “shrine of modern art” and Young’s modernist work fit in perfectly.
Young was a master of various printmaking techniques, producing large portfolios of etchings, lithographs, woodblock prints, linoblock prints and mono-prints. An expert draughtsman, Young produced landscapes of the industrial and wooded areas around New York, numerous portraits and figurative works, and many beautifully detailed still life studies.
In the 1920’s a magazine emerged from Greenwich Village through the Flying Stag Press called “Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire”, (no affiliation with Hugh Hefner’s magazine). The magazine was designed, “for the politically and artistically radical Bohemian Manhattan in the early 20th century”. Carl Zigrosser was on the advisory board of the magazine and provided woodcuts and linocuts for the publication through the Weyhe Gallery. Arthur Young’s “Black Athlete” was included in the portfolio, which is now housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Today his work can be found in the British Museum, London, gifted by the Contemporary Art Society and the Smithsonian, Washington DC, as well as many private collections in Canada and the USA.
