In 1947, in Jersey City New Jersey, the American artist Richard E. Schiff was born. Richard E. Schiff is a well known Realist. His parents were Louise Mary Reier and Leonard William Schiff. Richard had an older brother from his mother's first marriage, Walter Dennen Earle, born in 1938, deceased 1995, a victim of ALS also called Lou Gherig's Disease, for the famous Yankees player.At the age of 16 Richard was enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. After a review of his work by then Director Stewart Klonis, Richard was placed in Ernest Fiene's Saturday Adult painting and drawing class. There Schiff remained for two years until Mr. Fiene's untimely death in Paris in 1965. Richard had been the lst Class Monitor in Mr. Fiene's class.After graduating North Bergen High School in 1965, in North Bergen New Jersey, Schiff enrolled full time at the Art Students League of New York, this time with Will Barnet for painting and drawing. He also studied sculpture with Jose de Creeft that year. Schiff had displayed an instant at an early age in the German woodcarvers, Ernst Barlach among them. He did many fine carvings until slicing off the end of his left ring finger. Amazingly, it was re-attached successfully at North Hudson Hospital, now long gone, in Weehawken, New Jersey.] Schiff achieved early recognition when he showed his work at Corduroy Village Gallery in North Bergen when he was just 16 years old. Later that year his work was shown at the Center Art Gallery on west 57th street.That first year Schiff was working under Will Barnet (right) he received his first accolade from the League. Schiff’s large "Self-Portrait" in oil on canvas of 1966 won the Student Concours prize and as such it was reproduced in the League catalogue for 1967. Schiff had his studio in Greenwich Village at 35 Morton Street at that time. A charcoal drawing he had made of the same window featured in his award winning Self Portrait also featured the tree branch outside that window. This picture was also chosen to represent Barnet’s class for the summer catalog of the Art Students League in 1967.Schiff had taken ill that very autumn of 1966 and was hospitalized. He was not released until February of 1967, and was thrilled to get out and see his two pictures in the League catalogs. However he was not thrilled that Mr. Barnet had adopted the image of a tree seen through a window as the mainstay of the work he would produce for the next twenty years.In 1967 Barnet was judging a Painting Contest for the American Association of University Women in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Schiff entered the contest at Barnet’s urging and won the 1st Prize for Oil Painting with the very painting that had the tree and window as its central background motif. Later Schiff heard that Barnet had been “discovered” when a member of the Association happened upon the League catalogue with that very painting reproduced as best of the Barnet class. Barnet told Schiff they had kept his print he had on loan as the Judge to get even. Richard Schiff went on London and Amsterdam with his then wife Denise Steinberg Schiff. There he created his abstract series of “Monoclimates” that brought him international recognition. Upon their return to American in 1969 Schiff and his wife moved back into their Morton Street apartment and they rented a separate studio at 240 west 4th street for Schiff to paint in. In 1970 Schiff opened his first solo show at Avanti Galleries owned by Frances Wynshaw and Roma Gerard. He showed in April 1970 and at that time a casein abstraction entitled “To Celebrate Blue” was sold to the Gerard-Whitney Collection along with many other minor works. Schiff showed there again in 1971 in April and following that show he opened his studio in Greenwich Village to onlookers for an Open Studio Exhibit he shared with Cape Cod artist Michael Pavao now of New Mexico. Many of the works in that show were sold to Richard Albin-Zeglen, owner of the Albin-Zeglen Gallery on Prince Street in Soho. Schiff curated a show called “Interpretations of Sexuality” at Albin-Zeglen that featured artists like Audrey Flack and Louise Bourgeois for the first time where serious audiences would see their work.In November of 1970, Schiff was approached by poet and friend Professor Jack G. Azarch (left), a former boyhood friend. Azarch had read in the New York Times that an art gallery owner named Steven Radich had been arrested for exhibiting the work of Vietnam era sculptor Mark Morell. Morell had draped black coffins with American Flags. FBI agents arrested Radich and booked him on desecration of the flag laws. Azarch thought Schiff would react as he did and so the [Judson Flag Show] was born. It was touted by Schiff and his friend sculptor Neal C. Pace by attending all the meetings of artists that were held in New York City and asking them to participate, and they got favorable responses. Artists did not want to be told what kind of imagery was permissible versus another.Schiff wanted to duplicate the same conditions that Radich had presented at the time of his arrest. Schiff went to see former Marine Chaplain and Right Reverend Howard Moody at Greenwich Village’s controversial Judson Memorial Church, a Baptist congregation right on the edge of Washington Square Park. Moody agreed to be the “exhibitor” and the show would be done by an anonymous group, the “people’s flag show committee” who would remain unnamed. Sadly, three publicity seekers who had sneaked into the organizational ranks of the group, Faith Ringgold, John Hendricks and Jan Tosche, who called himself The King of Belgium in Exile, had their names announced at the spectacular star studded opening, carried on NBC White Paper. The very next minute the FBI arrested them and that was the end of the challenge to the constitutionality of the desecration of the flag laws the show was intended to be. And so The Judson Three had their trial and the Law is still a threat to free expression.Richard E. Schiff and Denise Schiff divorced. Schiff remarried. This time to a girl he had first met as a child. Co-incidentally, Schiff had grown up 6 blocks from the family of Will Barnet who was to become his future teacher. Schiff was reintroduced to Mary Elizabeth Barnet by her brother Richard Barnet, current League Instructor, who Schiff was currently showing with at Kevin Cooper Gallery in Jersey City.Schiff’s older brother Walter had been best friends with Richard Barnet and as a result Schiff spent much time with his brother in the Barnet –Epstein home in Union City. Schiff had an unusual relationship with both families. Their mother, Mary Sinclair had wed Will Barnet in 1934 and they had 5 children together before parting in 1952. They were Peter, Richard, Todd, Mary and Margaret. Mary Sinclair Barnet divorced Will in 1952 in Georgia after a painful separation period. According to Schiff: “Mary told me when she was quite old that Will would not stop his persistence after they separated and she said it reached a point where she had to take a desperate measure, one she lived to regret, thus confess in old age. She said she told Barnet the two daughters, who were his that they were not really his to get him to stop haunting and stalking her.” Schiff recounted that she told him that was why the girls were raised with the names of their step father, Doctor Joshua Epstein, himself a painter of great skill. “Mary’s birth certificate reads Mary Elizabeth Barnet, daughter of Mary and Will Barnet, and so do Margaret’s,”” he said.Schiff exhibited last in 1991 at the Deal New Jersey Jewish Community Center on Grant Avenue in Deal N.J. His life size painting of a seated man titled “Homeless” was purchased by world class collector Sylvia Gadd. Since her death, the painting hangs in the Israeli Museum of Fine Art in Jerusalem, part of her large bequest of art, primarily that of Germanic artists, who Schiff always acknowledged as belong to in spirit.Schiff instituted an art program at the [Ocean County Vocational Technical High Schools in Ocean County] and taught it for two years to get it going. He is now a Life Member of the Art Students League of New York and considers it to be his highest achievement.He recently did an article on Will Barnet that appeared in the 2009 spring issue of Fine Arts Magazine.Schiff lives today and has for the past 25 years with his wife Mary Elizabeth Barnet-Schiff, she a poet and editor of PoetryMagazine.com since 1996, a leading journal of world class poetry including all the work of former American Poet Laureates.Richard E. Schiff works from his studio in a renovated barn first erected in 1836 on one of the oldest undisturbed tracts of land in Ocean County New Jersey.
In 1947, in Jersey City New Jersey, the American artist Richard E. Schiff was born. Richard E. Schiff is a well known Realist. His parents were Louise Mary Reier and Leonard William Schiff. Richard had an older brother from his mother's first marriage, Walter Dennen Earle, born in 1938, deceased 1995, a victim of ALS also called Lou Gherig's Disease, for the famous Yankees player.At the age of 16 Richard was enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. After a review of his work by then Director Stewart Klonis, Richard was placed in Ernest Fiene's Saturday Adult painting and drawing class. There Schiff remained for two years until Mr. Fiene's untimely death in Paris in 1965. Richard had been the lst Class Monitor in Mr. Fiene's class.After graduating North Bergen High School in 1965, in North Bergen New Jersey, Schiff enrolled full time at the Art Students League of New York, this time with Will Barnet for painting and drawing. He also studied sculpture with Jose de Creeft that year. Schiff had displayed an instant at an early age in the German woodcarvers, Ernst Barlach among them. He did many fine carvings until slicing off the end of his left ring finger. Amazingly, it was re-attached successfully at North Hudson Hospital, now long gone, in Weehawken, New Jersey.] Schiff achieved early recognition when he showed his work at Corduroy Village Gallery in North Bergen when he was just 16 years old. Later that year his work was shown at the Center Art Gallery on west 57th street.That first year Schiff was working under Will Barnet (right) he received his first accolade from the League. Schiff’s large "Self-Portrait" in oil on canvas of 1966 won the Student Concours prize and as such it was reproduced in the League catalogue for 1967. Schiff had his studio in Greenwich Village at 35 Morton Street at that time. A charcoal drawing he had made of the same window featured in his award winning Self Portrait also featured the tree branch outside that window. This picture was also chosen to represent Barnet’s class for the summer catalog of the Art Students League in 1967.Schiff had taken ill that very autumn of 1966 and was hospitalized. He was not released until February of 1967, and was thrilled to get out and see his two pictures in the League catalogs. However he was not thrilled that Mr. Barnet had adopted the image of a tree seen through a window as the mainstay of the work he would produce for the next twenty years.In 1967 Barnet was judging a Painting Contest for the American Association of University Women in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Schiff entered the contest at Barnet’s urging and won the 1st Prize for Oil Painting with the very painting that had the tree and window as its central background motif. Later Schiff heard that Barnet had been “discovered” when a member of the Association happened upon the League catalogue with that very painting reproduced as best of the Barnet class. Barnet told Schiff they had kept his print he had on loan as the Judge to get even. Richard Schiff went on London and Amsterdam with his then wife Denise Steinberg Schiff. There he created his abstract series of “Monoclimates” that brought him international recognition. Upon their return to American in 1969 Schiff and his wife moved back into their Morton Street apartment and they rented a separate studio at 240 west 4th street for Schiff to paint in. In 1970 Schiff opened his first solo show at Avanti Galleries owned by Frances Wynshaw and Roma Gerard. He showed in April 1970 and at that time a casein abstraction entitled “To Celebrate Blue” was sold to the Gerard-Whitney Collection along with many other minor works. Schiff showed there again in 1971 in April and following that show he opened his studio in Greenwich Village to onlookers for an Open Studio Exhibit he shared with Cape Cod artist Michael Pavao