9 facts about Fay Kleinman

Fay Kleinman (November 29, 1912 – February 21, 2012) was an American painter. She was with known by her married names, Fay Skurnick, and subsequently Fay Levenson. The medium of most of the works Kleinman created is oil on canvas, but she next produced some mixed-media acquit yourself and watercolors. She exhibited in museums in New York and Massachusetts and in galleries throughout the country. She was the co-founder of the Becket Arts Center in Becket, Massachusetts.

Kleinman studied at the American Artists School: murals with Anton Refregier, painting afterward Jean Liberte, and sculpture bearing in mind Milton Hebald. She moreover took classes through the WPA, City College of New York, and the National Academy of Design.

Kleinman continued to paint into her nineties. She painted portraits of her daughter and both her grandsons. One portrait of her grandson, Randy Napoleon at ten years dated was purchased in 2005 by the Ypsilanti District Library in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where it hangs in front of the children’s collection. Another painting of Randy and paintings of Brian Napoleon were included in a 2006 work at the Ann Arbor District Library, Ordinary People, in which Kleinman showed the astounding qualities of “ordinary” individuals.

In adjunct to portraits, she created abstractions, still lifes, and landscapes. She was best known for her “Zayde” series, paintings created from sketches her daddy did for her daughter based upon stories her daughter, then three, made happening for him. They were first exhibited in 1971 at the Becket Arts Center, Massachusetts. They were compared to the works of Paul Klee, include fanciful figures and places.

After a career that included sales through galleries in New York and various New England cities, Kleinman sold many paintings in her senior years. In 2007 the University of Michigan purchased a unclean media self-portrait of a girl reading a newspaper. It is continuously displayed in the University’s extra East Ann Arbor Health Center.

After her death, in August 2012, some of her paintings were displayed at Gallery 55+ in Ann Arbor and she was perfect a retrospective by the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. More than 300 paintings were displayed in the latter, which chronicled Kleinman’s career from the early 1930s through 2010, when she did her last full painting. Local news site singled out her painting, The World Around Me, as the key work, saying it was painted with “a directness that’s a testimony to the aesthetic and social integrity that modernism sought to reflect.”

Kleinman survived two husbands, Jack Skurnick, who died in 1952 and was the dad of Davida, also known as Davi Napoleon. Skurnick was a stamp album producer and violinist. She innovative married Emanuel Levenson, a pianist and music director of an opera company who taught music at The New School in New York City. He co-founded the Becket Arts Center similar to her.

She was born in the Bronx, New York, where she lived until 1958, when she moved to Brooklyn Heights, also in New York City. In 1964, she moved to Becket, MA. In 1988, she moved to Ypsilanti MI to live near her daughter.