Andre Boratko
Man Posing
1968
Watercolor on paper
6.5"x9.25" green painted carved wood frame 13.5"x1.75"x15.5"
Signed in paint upper right
Very Good Condition - Minor wear consistent with age and history.
Andre Boratko (1912-1990)
He was 2 years old when his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Minnesota. Boratko studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and returned to Minnesota to teach at the St. Paul School of Art in the 1930s. He was the state director of the Work Progress Administration's Federal Art Project in South Dakota, where he met and married Dorothy Scallin Turnley, a young widow with two children.
They moved to California in 1943, where he at first he worked as a production illustrator for Kaiser Shipyards. In 1946 he joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, where he taught figure drawing, design and painting until 1954.
Boratko fulfilled a number of mural comissions, including a 77-foot-long painting on the history of Hayward, a 160-foot frieze for the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco, and a mural for the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Richmond.
Another one of his murals can be seen at the Minnesota School for the Deaf in Faribault, Minnesota; a male torso is part of the IBM Collection; a collection of large pen drawings of World War II Navy vessels belongs to the Navy Museum in Washington, D.C. Other works are in private collections in the San Francisco Bay area and southern California.
He was a member of the Society of Western Artists and the National Society of Interior Designers, and is listed in the Who's Who in American Art.
Source:
Family recollections
Obituary, The Tribune, Oakland, California, July 19, 1990
