01 Painting, The Art Of The Nude, Oscar VanYoung's Hot Summer Day, with footnotes # 183

Oscar VanYoung (1906 - 1991)

Hot Summer Day

Oil on canvas

38" H x 48" W

Private collection

Sold for $1,200.00 in January 2020

Oscar Van Young was born in Vienna on 15 April 1906. For business reasons his father found himself in Russia at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, and was followed there by his family. Oscar spent some of his teenage years in Odessa, Russia during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution; his parents died of starvation there. The young man was taken under the wing of some influential American diplomats and sent to the United States under their sponsorship in the early 1920s.

Coming to Chicago in the mid-1920s, Van Young worked as an errand boy, and then as a lithographer, a skill that emerged in some of his earliest artistic works.  He began to gain a reputation as an artist during the Depression years in Chicago. He was studying painting in a class taught by Sam Ostrowsky when he met the artist Loli Vann (née Lilian Finkelstein) in the early 1930s; they were married in 1935. In 1940 the couple moved to Los Angeles. During the war years Oscar worked as a draughtsman for North American Aviation. 

In Los Angeles, Oscar Van Young’s reputation as a painter grew to national levels. He showed paintings in important exhibitions. He had numerous one-man shows throughout California, was represented in many museums and galleries internationally, and had works acquired by a number of prominent museums. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For many years he taught privately, as well as at the Otis Art Institute, Pasadena City College, and California State University-Los Angeles. He became a visible and prominent figure in the Los Angeles arts scene during the period 1940-1980. A collection of his professional papers and those of his wife, Loli Vann, is held by the western section of the Smithsonian Institution. Oscar Van Young died in Los Angeles on 26 February 1993, survived for some time by his wife of 57 years. More on  Oscar Van Young

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