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Born in Brussels, Belgium , Joseph Meert (1905 – 1989) emigrated to the U.S. at the age
of five. As a young adult he studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City
Art Institute, where Meert himself taught from 1935 to
1941. During the Great Depression, he worked as a Works Progress Administration
(WPA) artist, painting murals in government buildings. He became a close friend
to Jackson Pollock, and is credited with saving Pollock’s life on a sub-zero
winter’s night in 1943. The works in this retrospective examine Meert’s influences, from social realism during the
Depression, through geometric abstraction in the late 1940s, to abstract
expressionism in the 1950s and beyond. Meert spent his
last decade institutionalized for mental illness, his care funded in part a
grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. With the aid of an art therapist,
however, he continued to produce a final series of watercolors during this
period.
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