Louis Finkelstein (artist)

Louis Finkelstein (1923 – 20 June 2000) was an American painter, art critic and professor who taught for at Queens College, City University of New York. Several of his works have been compared to those of French performer and Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

Born in New York City in 1923, Louis Finkelstein studied painting at the Cooper Union, the Art Students League of New York and the Brooklyn Museum School of Art that used to be located in the museum as a portion of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Finkelstein was an artiste and an educator. He was an articulate speaker and writer on art. He taught at the Philadelphia College of Art, Yale School of Art (where he served as performing arts dean of the Art School from 1962 to 1964), and he was the head of the art department at Queens College, CUNY for higher than 25 years. In 1979, he normal the College Art Association's honor for distinguished teaching and in 1999, was awarded an honorary doctorate in the fine arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Finkelstein time-honored several Fulbright grants, an NEA for painting, and he was a zealot of the National Academy of Design.

His paintings have been shown at Yale University, the New York Studio School, the Riverside Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Pennsylvania Academy.

On 20 June 2000, Finkelstein died in hospice in New York City.

Finkelstein was married to artiste Gretna Campbell (d. 1987) by whom he had two children, a son, artist Henry Finkelstein (b. 1958), and a daughter, Martha. On 8 November 1989, he married his second wife Jane Culp.