Joseph Raffael

The field of work recorded is painting. Work by Joseph Raffael is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Toledo Museum of Art.

• Name — Joseph Raffael • Birth Name — Joe Raffaele • Born — 22 February 1933 • Birthplace — Brooklyn, NY, United States • Died — 12 July 2021 • Place of death — Cagnes-sur-Mer • Spouse — Lannis Raffael, Judy North • Awards — 1974: First Prize, Tokyo International Biennial, Japan • Website — josephraffael.com • Field — Painting Watercolor • Training — Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Yale School of Art • Works — * Moving Toward the Light II (2016) • Blossoms and Sky (2008) • Renewal (1995) • Blue Pond, Winter Shore (1977) • Hilo (1975)

Raffael was born on February 22, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. He was the youngest of three children and the only son of Sicilian and Swiss-Irish parents, Joseph Marino Raffaele and Cora Kaelin Raffaele. He became interested in drawing at age 7, and during high school years took classes at the Brooklyn Museum. From 1953–54, he attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. In the summer of 1954 he studied with Joseph Albers at the Yale Summer School, then attended Yale University where he received his BFA in 1956.

In 1958, he won a Fulbright fellowship to study for two years in Florence and Rome, and began painting complexly colored watercolors of flower forms. He mounted his first New York City exhibition of his Umbrian watercolors in 1963, at the d’Arcy Galleries, while at the same time battling hepatitis from which he almost died; when he recovered, he shifted to "real life" images based on photographs. Raffael’s work received critical praise beginning in the mid-1960s. In 1965, Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery held a one-person show of his work. In 1972, using photographs of rivers taken by the artist William Allan, he began to produce his "water painting". In 1973 Time Magazine published an article by Robert Hughes A Slice of the River, describing his water paintings. Hughes stated that the artist’s color-drenched canvases display “a tender virtuosity without parallel in other American figurative painting today.” • Illustration — Lipstick, Braces, 1955, Oil on Canvas, 55" x 40" • Illustration — Man, Boy, Doe, 1965, Whitney Museum In 2018, Raffael collaborated with David Pagel to produce Talking Beauty: A Conversation Between Joseph Raffael and David Pagel about Art, Love, Death, and Creativity. In a review of the book in the San Francisco Review of Books, it was written that, "...the joy of this book is slowly reading the interchange of ideas form the exchanged emails between these two men – comments on life, death, art and artists, writing, creativity, children, pets – all blended into a wondrous tapestry of the essence of being truly alive." "

• Illustration — For Lannis 1944-2019, watercolor on paper, 91.4 x 91.4 cm - 36 x 36 in. On May 19, 2019 his wife Lannis Wood Raffael died after a long period of health crises. Before her death, Raffael completed his painting "For Lannis: 1944–2019". Raffael died in Cagnes-sur-Mer at the age of 88 on July 12, 2021.