Ralph Wickiser

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Ralph Lewanda Wickiser (1910–1998) was an American painter who blended abstract and representational art in his own distinctive style. He was born in Greenup, Illinois, and showed talent from a very young age, painting watercolor landscapes in the second grade. At 18 he studied life drawing in Chicago, but the Great Depression made it hard to support himself, so he returned home. His mother encouraged him to study at Eastern Illinois University, where he earned a BA and met his future wife, Jane Ann Bisson.

While in school, Wickiser was mentored by the respected artist Paul Turner Sargent, and they often painted outdoors together. After college, he went to New York and won a Tiffany Foundation residency in Oyster Bay. He exhibited at Grand Central Art Galleries and gained early attention for working in both abstraction and representation, sometimes in the same body of work.

In the mid-1930s Wickiser taught at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge and pursued advanced studies in philosophy at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University. His work toured museums as part of a traveling exhibition, and he spent summers in Woodstock, New York, where he would later become closely connected with a community of artists. In 1941 he was named Chair of LSU’s Art Department.

During World War II he served in the Navy in Washington, D.C. After the war, Wickiser continued to exhibit widely in major venues, including the Corcoran Gallery, the San Francisco Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the late 1940s he began writing about art education, authoring An Introduction to Art Activities (1947) and later An Introduction to Art Education (1957). He also co-authored Mardi Gras Day (1947) with fellow Louisiana artists.

Wickiser left LSU in 1953 to lead the art education division at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and he later chaired the Undergraduate Art Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Throughout his career he remained active in exhibitions and publications, including a showing at the Whitney Museum in 1953.

From the 1950s to the 1960s Wickiser focused on non-objective, abstract work, particularly the Compassion I (1950–1958) and Compassion II series. In the mid-1960s he revisited the figure, creating works that mixed abstraction with representational elements, often in triptychs inspired by reflections in mirrors. In the 1970s he began The Four Seasons series, drawing on rocks and water, which led to the later Reflected Stream paintings.

In 1975 Wickiser and his wife moved to Woodstock, where he painted full-time and used photographs as references. He photographed the Vredenburg Stream near his home, capturing light, water, rocks, and reflections, and then transformed them into paintings that fused representation with abstraction. He continued to explore these themes through the 1980s and 1990s, producing new variations on the stream, shadows, and other natural subjects.

Ralph Wickiser’s work was recognized in many exhibitions and retrospectives during his later years, and he remained active as a painter until shortly before his death in 1998. He received several honors along the way, including the Tiffany Fellowship (1934), an honorary PhD from Eastern Illinois University (1956), a Distinguished Alumni Award (1964), and professorship emeritus status at Pratt Institute.