Abraham Lishinsky
Abraham Lishinsky (1905–1982) was an American painter and muralist best known for seven murals created for New Deal art programs in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in the Russian Empire and grew up on Manhattan’s East Side and in Brooklyn. He studied at the Educational Alliance, the National Academy of Design, and with John Sloan at the Art Students League.
Lishinsky began as an assistant to Jean Charlot, the Franco‑Mexican muralist. From 1934 to 1943 he produced seven murals for federal art programs known as PWAP/WPA. His first mural was made in collaboration with Charlot for the lobby of Straubenmuller Textile High School in Manhattan, and that work still survives.
His largest remaining work is a 54‑panel, 2,400‑square‑foot mural called Major Influences in Civilization, which wraps around the auditorium at the former Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn. He supervised this mural and brought in friends and colleagues to help, including Irving A. Block, his longtime collaborator. One assistant on the project was Abram “Al” Lerner, who later became the founding director of the Hirshhorn Museum.
Lishinsky and Block also collaborated on other major pieces, such as a large representational mural about the history of medicine for the Medicine and Public Health pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Washington and the Battle of the Bronx, a 15-by-5‑foot mural at the Wakefield Station post office in the Bronx (completed in 1943) under the U.S. Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts. The fate of the World’s Fair mural panels is unknown today, while the Wakefield mural remained in place for years but has deteriorated.
In 1941 he painted Cotton Harvest for a post office in Woodruff, South Carolina. That mural was restored in 1999 and is on permanent loan to the South Carolina State Museum. He also painted smaller murals for Bellevue Hospital’s solarium in Manhattan and for a Protestant chapel at Rikers Island, later demolished or altered.
Lishinsky’s work for the federal programs was representational, a style known as Social Realism. He also had friendships with artists who worked in abstract styles, and his own work often combined monumental figures with a sense of formal, flat plane design and a touch of abstraction.
After the federal programs ended, he became a salesman to support his wife and four children, buying a home in Flatbush in 1950. He continued painting in his spare time and wrote plays and stories during travel on sales trips. His play The Collaboration won a CAPS award in 1981.
In the early 1950s he shifted toward abstract tendencies, studying with Wallace K. Harrison. He and his family spent two years (1955–1957) in Majorca, Spain, painting full‑time. Upon returning to New York, he exhibited at the Terrain Gallery and the Washington Irving Gallery in 1958–1959, but he continued to work in the business world for many years. He retired from business in 1971 and devoted himself to painting again, pursuing a Cubist and abstract‑expressionist approach grounded in structural ideas. He felt meaning in art came from the warmth of the unconscious as it speaks through form and color. He began showing more openly in the early 1980s and died in 1982 after a period of illness.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 20:20 (CET).