Art Brenner

Art Brenner (1924–2013) was an American abstract sculptor and painter. Born in New York City, he lived and worked in Paris from 1964 to 2012.

He has had numerous solo and outfit exhibitions in cities such as Paris, London, Avignon, Barcelona, Brussels, Brest, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, Montreal, and Adelaide, Australia.^{[citation needed]}

His play-act is in public collections in France, Spain, and the United States (Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.; Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, Alaska). He was then the subject of a gruff CNN film, "An American Sculptor in Paris" (1995). The French meting out has honored him by inducting him as a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres", the French equivalent of induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a sculptor whose works are frequently large and created for public, architectural settings, Brenner wrote a 1971 article for Leonardo magazine (MIT Press) entitled "Concerning Sculpture and Architecture", in which he observes that "the monumental scale of advocate sculpture... has speedily moved sculpture from the private to the public sector, that is toward a renewal of its bank account with architecture." He after that notes that "It has been argued that highly developed architecture by its enormously nature, its functionalism and purity, has little need for sculpture." Rejecting this analysis, he yet acknowledges that the aesthetic values of highly developed architecture pull off require a careful approach to the use of monumental sculpture in conjunction with enlightened buildings, and that "architects should engage sculptors as critical members of a team" (p. 99).