James Richter

Richter was a 1975 recipient of the Doris Kreindler Memorial Prize and knew many of the leading American painters working near his Lower West Side Manhattan neighborhood.

He was born to an immigrant family from Kiev, Ukraine. Richter grew up during the Great Depression and moved to the Catskills in upstate New York, where he worked as a farmhand. He became an expert handyman and early electronics enthusiast, and served for 35 years as an engineer for the U.S. Post Office at New York City’s Main Branch.

During that time, he also refined his considerable skills as a painter. Following World War II, he was influenced by well-known Abstract Expressionist artists in his neighborhood with whom he regularly socialized. He made short visits to Sicily and spent summers in Provincetown, whose flourishing artist community he first encountered in 1939.

Painting became Richter’s full-time occupation after retirement. His work developed through four distinct phases: realism in the 1940s, cubism in the 1950s, abstraction in the 1960s, and impressionism in the 1970s. His final works of the 1980s synthesize the prior periods and are regarded as some of his finest.

A deeply humble man, Richter disdained sales and rarely released his paintings. The bulk of his oeuvre is held by the James A. Richter Art Foundation in Sedona, Arizona.