Ralph L. Wickiser (1910–1998) was a distinctive and influential figure in 20th-century American painting and art education. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, Wickiser developed a deeply personal visual language, synthesizing the seemingly opposing forces of abstraction and representation into a unified, poetic vision rooted in nature and spiritual contemplation.
Born in Greenup, Illinois, Wickiser showed an early aptitude for art. He studied life drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago but was forced to return home due to financial hardship during the Great Depression. Undeterred, he completed his B.A. at Eastern Illinois University in 1934 under the mentorship of the regional landscape painter Paul Turner Sargent. That same year, he married Jane Ann Bisson, and together they raised three children while he pursued his dual callings as both painter and teacher.
Wickiser’s early career included teaching positions at Louisiana State University, where he became Chair of the Art Department and began writing extensively on art education. In 1953, he moved to SUNY New Paltz as Director of the Art Education Division, before ultimately settling at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York—a position that would define much of his career. At Pratt, he first served as Chair of the Undergraduate Art Department and, from 1962 to 1975, as Director of Graduate Programs in Art and Design. Wickiser worked alongside and mentored generations of artists during Pratt’s most formative years, including overlapping with key figures of midcentury American art such as Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Pearlstein, George McNeil, and Ernest Briggs.
Wickiser’s own painting evolved alongside his career as an educator. In the 1930s and 40s, his work was rooted in representational modes before shifting in the 1950s toward Abstract Expressionism. His "Compassion I & II" series from this period, inspired by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, reflects his early engagement with deeply spiritual and emotional abstraction. By the 1970s, he began to reintroduce figuration into his work, notably in his "Reflections in a Mirror" series, which would become a stepping stone toward his most iconic body of work, The Reflected Stream series (1975–1998). These paintings, drawn from the flowing streams near his home and studio in Woodstock, New York, explore light, reflection, and surface as metaphors for inner states of being—works described as “symphonic and exquisitely intimate,” and “a world both interior and exterior, a place of the spirit as much as the mind.” His late series, such as The Covered Apple Tree and Shadows on the Grass, continued this profound dialogue between observation, abstraction, and transcendence.
In addition to his studio practice, Wickiser was a prolific author and scholar. His books An Introduction to Art Activities (1947) and An Introduction to Art Education (1957) became widely used texts that influenced generations of American art educators. His writings reflect the same openness to both intuition and structure that characterized his paintings, and his scholarly work remains respected within the field of art education.
Throughout his career, Wickiser received numerous honors, including multiple Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowships (1934, 1939), research grants from the Louisiana State Research Council, and an honorary doctorate from Eastern Illinois University (1956). Upon his retirement from Pratt Institute in 1975, he was named Professor Emeritus.
Today, Ralph Wickiser’s paintings are held in many of the country’s most prestigious collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Dayton Art Institute, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Library of Congress, Susquehanna University, and Georgetown University. His legacy is actively preserved and promoted by the Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York, founded by his son.
Throughout his long life, Wickiser remained an artist deeply committed to the act of seeing—both outwardly into the natural world and inwardly into the realm of contemplation and spirit. His work continues to stand as a unique bridge between the personal and the universal, the representational and the abstract, and ultimately, between art and life itself.