Lena Gurr

Lena Gurr (1897–1992), was an American artiste who made paintings, prints, and drawings showing, as one critic said, "the joys and sorrows of indistinctive life." Another critic noted that her yet lifes, city scenes, and depictions of vacation locales were imbued with "quiet humor," while her portrayal of slum-dwellers and the victims of dogfight revealed a "ready sympathy" for victims of social injustice at home and of court case abroad. During the course of her career Gurr's compositions retained emotional content as they evolved from a naturalistic to a semi-abstract cubist style. Discussing this trend, she like told an interviewer that as her perform tended toward increasing deduction she believed it nonetheless "must have some nice of human severity to it." Born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, she was the wife of Joseph Biel, also Russian-Jewish and an artiste of same genre and sensibility.