Mort Künstler, renowned painter of epic historical scenes, dies at 97

Boston Globe

16-02-2025

As he branched out in the 1970s to create large canvases of epic scenes in American history, including more than 350 images of the Civil War, he consulted historians and experts and visited the locations of his scenes to ensure the accuracy of his work.
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His paintings sometimes challenged and corrected the factual details of well-known historical paintings, including one of the most famous: Emanuel Leutze's dramatic 1851 rendering of 'Washington Crossing the Delaware.'
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In the Leutze painting, Washington, at daybreak, stands tall in a crowded rowboat beside an American flag, which hadn't yet been adopted in 1776, when the crossing took place. Mr. Künstler, by contrast, after months of research, painted Washington in the dead of night gripping the wheel of a cannon on a 60-foot-long flatboat ferry guided by cable and crowded with dozens of troops and horses.
'I'm not knocking the original,' he told The New York Times in 2011. 'It's got great impact, and Leutze did a heck of a job. I give Leutze higher marks for a good painting than for historical accuracy, but why can't you have both?'
Mr. Künstler's paintings have joined the permanent collections of dozens of museums, and he had scores of solo shows in galleries and museums across the country, including a 2014-15 exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. He has been compared to Rockwell, whose work he cited as an influence, as well as Frederic Remington and Winslow Homer.
'He was one of the most highly regarded contemporary historical painters of our time,' said Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, chief curator of the Rockwell museum. 'There was a cinematic sense about his work. Mort was an exceptional draftsman with an eye for creating drama.'
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Morton Künstler was born Aug. 28, 1927, at his home in Brooklyn to Jewish parents of Russian and Austrian descent, Thomas and Rebecca (Weitz) Künstler.
As family lore has it, the name Künstler, which means 'artist' in German, was bestowed on Mr. Künstler's paternal great-grandfather, a sculptor, by Russian Czar Alexander III in the small German-speaking area of Poland where the great-grandfather lived.
Mort was a prodigy with a pencil by age 3. He spent stretches of his childhood bedridden by illness, during which he drew everything around him, while his father, an amateur artist, kept him supplied with art materials. On Saturdays, Mort attended art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
As a child, his first paying gig of sorts came as a counterfeiter of (free but scarce) youth tickets for Brooklyn Dodgers games, Jane Künstler said.
As a student at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, he studied under Leon Friend, an art teacher who helped start the careers of many students, including photographer Irving Penn and graphic artists Gene Federico and Alex Steinweiss.
Mr. Künstler also excelled in sports. While studying art at Brooklyn College, he competed in basketball and diving and ran track.
'He really wanted to be an athlete but pursued art as a backup career choice, as an illustrator,' his daughter said.
He transferred to the University of California Los Angeles on a basketball scholarship but returned to New York after a semester when his father suffered a heart attack.
Mr. Künstler worked summers as a waiter and lifeguard at resorts in the Catskill and the Pocono mountain regions. At one point, he shared quarters with future Boston Celtics basketball star Bob Cousy. They played together in games against other Borscht Belt hotel teams to entertain guests, Jane Künstler said.
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Mr. Künstler finished college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1950 and met a classmate, Deborah Goldberg, who would become his wife of 73 years.
In addition to his daughter, Jane, and his wife, he leaves another daughter, Amy; a son, David; and three grandchildren.
By the early 1950s, Mr. Künstler was hustling between publishing houses in New York City, snapping up work as an illustrator for pulp paperbacks and popular men's adventure magazines such as Stag and True Adventures.
Those publishers demanded vibrant scenes of red-blooded heroes facing down disaster. Mr. Künstler's bold illustrations became emblematic of the hard-boiled pulp genre of the 1950s.
'His experience as an illustrator of men's adventure magazines helped him to refine his storytelling abilities,' said Haboush Plunkett, of the Rockwell museum. 'The more sensational an artwork was, the more readers were drawn to it.'
It was a skill that had wide-ranging applications.
In 1969, Mr. Künstler illustrated an abridged version of 'The Godfather,' the Mario Puzo novel that was the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film. In the 1970s, the artist created memorable posters for action movies, including 'The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,' and then parodied the genre with a goofball version of the 1975 film 'Jaws' for Mad Magazine.
For many years Mr. Künstler worked in rented studios in Manhattan, including the Lincoln Arcade, a commercial building on the Upper West Side used over the decades by an eclectic mix of bohemian artists, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Marcel Duchamp.
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In 1978, Mr. Künstler moved his family to the village of Cove Neck on Long Island, in the town of Oyster Bay, and set up a third-floor studio overlooking the water. He used a special easel mounted on a large circular platform that rotated by motor under rooftop windows to maximize the natural light.
By the end of the 1970s, he began concentrating on fine-art paintings of historical subjects, often military themes. He painted scenes of wars from the American Revolution through Vietnam.
A commission by CBS to paint a scene for the 1982 miniseries 'The Blue and the Gray' piqued his interest in the Civil War. His detailed, panoramic rendering of the Battle of Gettysburg, 'High Water Mark,' was unveiled at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum on the 125th anniversary of the battle in 1988.
'He was to Civil War illustration what Shelby Foote was to Civil War prose: a hypnotic master storyteller with an eye for color and character, drama and detail,' said Harold Holzer, a Civil War expert and author.
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