Robert Preusser

During a period when Texas art was dominated by regionalist styles, Robert Preusser, alongside Seymour Fogel and Ben Culwell, was one of the earliest nonobjective artists in Texas, and was a pioneer of abstraction.

Preusser was an innovator throughout his teaching and painting career. The work from his teenage years is especially avant-garde. The images are surreal, mystical, energetic, fantastically expressive and uninhibited. Form, color, and composition are imbued with a sophistication that belies his years. Looking carefully at the almost infinite detail in some of his oil paintings, one begins to see paintings within paintings, and worlds within the paintings as well.

Robert Preusser, an abstract expressionist painter who preferred mixed media, was born in Houston, Texas. He began art lessons at the age of eleven, studying under Ola McNeill Davidson. In his early teens, he began exhibiting nationally and internationally. Preusser later studied with Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Robert Wolff at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the early 1940s. He also studied at the Newcomb School of Art in New Orleans and at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.

During World War II, Robert Preusser served from 1942 to 1945 in the US Army's 84th Engineer Camouflage Battalion in North Africa, Germany, Italy and France. He served as a camouflage expert, specializing in enemy aerial reconnaissance deception by replicating towns, bridges and other landmarks to put the enemy geographically off course.

After the war, he became an art educator. Returning to Houston in 1947, Preusser joined the faculty of the Museum of Fine Arts School of Art. In 1951, Preusser joined the Art Department of the University of Houston. Preusser then moved to Cambridge, MA in 1954 to teach at MIT, and remained there for 31 years. From 1974 until his retirement in 1985, Preusser was Director of Education at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.

While in Houston, Preusser was a cofounder and director of the Contemporary Arts Association, a forerunner for the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, from 1948 to 1951. He was also the USA co-editor of LEONARDO, an international journal of contemporary artists, from 1974 to 1989.

In 1952, LIFE Magazine invited Edith Halpert, owner and director of New York’s prestigious Downtown Gallery, to identify ten “Stars of Tomorrow” in the art world. Ms. Halpert selected Robert Preusser, along with Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles Sheeler, among others.