Robert
Birmelin.

About the Artist

The crowd as subject. The city as canvas.

Robert Birmelin was a New York painter whose figurative work focused relentlessly on the urban crowd — figures in motion, in transit, overwhelmed by the density of the city around them. He was not a street photographer with a brush. He was a painter who understood that the modern condition is one of perpetual proximity to strangers, and that this proximity is the subject.

Birmelin studied at the Cooper Union, Yale, and in Rome on a Fulbright. He taught at Queens College for decades and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn, and more than forty other institutions. He was as serious as a painter gets.

Works by Birmelin have been shown at Lift Trucks Art as part of Tom Christopher’s ongoing engagement with the tradition of urban American painting. The connection is not accidental. Both painters worked in New York, both understood the city as a formal problem, and both kept painting when the culture moved on to other concerns.

“A painter who understood that the modern condition is one of perpetual proximity to strangers.”

Lift Trucks Art