Biography
Flora Natapoff (b. Brooklyn, New York, USA 1936 - d. Los Angeles, California, USA 2020), an Abstract Expressionist painter whose enormous, dramatic collages depicted cityscapes and construction sites, attended the New York High School of Music & Arts, Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a masters degree in fine art. Her main influences were the New York School, European Modernism and the study of Chinese painting. Her subsequent work involved a series of individual styles. She moved to London in 1983, and was married twice, first to MIT physicist Alan Natapoff, and then to the late British psychotherapist Anthony Ryle. Natapoff, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, also lived and worked in California, Cambridge, Mass. and Umbria, Italy. Later in her career, Natapoff turned to Chinese scrolls for inspiration, creating long and intricate grid-like images of urban street scenes.
Boston Globe reviews described her work as "powerful," "lushly abstract," and possessing a "formal but dynamic authority." Natapoff was represented in Boston by the Barbara Krakow Gallery (now the Krakow Witkin Gallery). She taught art and art history at Harvard between 1974-1982, serving as Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts from 1978-79. Natapoff's collages were heavily layered, often incorporating sliced-up fragments and images from previous pieces of her own work. About her layering and juxtapositions, Natapoff wrote that they "reflect different aspects of my nature," and that the interplay "of the many languages about reality which I have encountered and participated in . . . allows me to give an account of reality I can almost believe in."
