Artist
Oscar Andrew
Hammerstein III.
Working in New York, NY
About the Artist
Old-fashioned Modernist. Post-modernism bores me.
Oscar “Andy” Hammerstein III grew up inside one of American theater’s defining dynasties — the great-great-grandson of Oscar Hammerstein II of Rodgers & Hammerstein — and chose to become a painter anyway. His inspiration is unglamorous and specific: late-night drives down the Saw Mill Parkway, the way highway light fractures in the windshield, the distillation of a road traveled so many times it becomes something else. “I am synthesizing the experience of driving down a road,” he has said. “It’s a distillation of driving over time.” He studied at the Art Students League, Parsons, and Skowhegan, and teaches the history of NYC theater at Columbia University.
He showed alongside Joe Stefanelli in Lift Trucks’ second-ever exhibition in 2009 — five paintings and twenty drawings, including his large-scale oil Shenandoah Twilight. Five years later, in the summer of 2014, Hammerstein and Tom Christopher spent thirty days occupying a vacant storefront at the Brill Building on 49th and Broadway, painting live for six hours a day while New York walked past. His painting Theoretical Trees 1 is part of the Lift Trucks collection.
He is also the author of The Hammersteins: A Musical Theatre Family (2011). He describes himself as “an old-fashioned Modernist” — a commitment, not a pose. “Post-modernism bores me,” he told Art World Confidential in 2010. “The last thing you want to do is get Buddhist in your artwork.”
“I am an old-fashioned Modernist. Post-modernism bores me.”
Andrew Hamemrstein III • 2009
Featured Work
Works
From the collection.
Visit the showroom.
Independent studio and gallery on Route 22 in Croton Falls, NY. 50 miles from New York City. Open by appointment.