Frederick J. Whiteman | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Frederick J. Whiteman (1909-1997)

Raised in a small town in Pennsylvania, Frederick J. Whiteman began to study in art in high school. His father was a distributor of mechanical and electrical products for the railway and mining industries and may have inspired Whiteman’s own technical interests. As a young man, Whiteman began his career as a draftsman for an engineering company and, in 1929, moved to Pittsburgh to enroll at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he studied under the artist Alexander Kostellow, a modernist who was a colleague of Vaclav Vytlacil and Jan Matulka. The following year, Whiteman relocated to New York to attend the Art Students League where he studied with Matulka.

In New York, he worked in the art department at a Brooklyn advertising agency but ultimately gave up his commercial work with the objective of founding an art school with Kostellow, which would be based on the Bauhaus model. Their plans were never realized, and Whiteman concentrated on his painting, cultivating a style that combined cubist principles with mechanical imagery.

In 1935, he exhibited in the “Abstract Art in America” exhibition at the Whitney Museum. One of the founding members of the American Abstract Artists, from 1937-39 Whiteman also served as director of the WPA Federal Art Centers in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Greenville, Mississippi. When the WPA programs began drawing to a close at the end of the 1930s, he returned to New York in 1939 and joined the faculty of the Pratt Institute, where he taught until 1974.