We are pleased to announce that we represent
the estate of Roland Wise
(1923-2005)
Roland Wise’s legacy as an important Western New York
artist is attested to by the impressive body of
work—interiors, landscapes and still lifes—he painted while
professor of fine arts at Buffalo State College from 1955
to 1992.
Wise was born in San Francisco, CA, into a Jewish family
that had immigrated to the U.S. just before World War
I. His father died when Roland was four. His widowed
mother returned to Brooklyn, NY, to be near her family. She
remarried and raised Roland with his younger siblings
through the Great Depression. Despite his family’s
indifference to the arts, Roland’s talent was recognized
and nurtured in the New York City public schools. Dubbed
the “class artist,” at an early age, Wise developed the
lifelong habits of continually sketching and educating
himself by visiting great museums.
During World War II, he was a radio operator with the
U.S. Army Air Force Air Transport Command, based in Oxford,
England. He often flew to Paris on assignment, where he
reveled in the arts and culture of the newly liberated
city.
After the war, Wise used his GI Bill benefits to attend The
Art Students League in New York City, where he studied from
1946 to 1949. Artists Will Barnet (b. 1911) and Morris
Kantor (1896-1974) were among his teachers. Of that time,
he said that he was “in the right place at the right
time”—in New York, the world’s undisputed art capitol, and
particularly, from The Art Students League’s mid-town
location, within walking distance of the Met, the MOMA, and
Madison Avenue galleries.
Also during this period, Wise was an assistant to Umberto
Romano (1905-1984) at the Romano Art School in Gloucester,
MA. Romano, a graduate of The National Academy, greatly
influenced Wise’s later lecturing and teaching style.
Wise received his Art Students League diploma in June 1949,
and married Josephine Corsello, a Brooklyn native, later
that year. Over the next two years, he worked as a
commercial artist in New York City. He briefly had his own
business, and then became the assistant art director for
Remington Rand’s house
publication, Systems.
But fine arts remained his identity and passion.
In
1951, armed with strong recommendations from Barnet and
Kantor, Wise decided to follow that passion, and became an
assistant professor at the newly established School of Art
at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
By June 1955, he and Jo had two children, and Wise had
earned a bachelor of fine arts degree concurrent with his
teaching duties. He was offered an assistant professor
position at Buffalo State College, in Buffalo, NY.
For the next 37 years, Wise taught painting and drawing
there. Never one to stop learning himself, he earned a
master’s degree in art education from New York University
in 1959. He soon became a full professor and in the late
1960s, he served as chairman of the fine arts department;
he retired in 1992, and continued to paint until his death
in December of 2005.
Wise painted for over a half century in Buffalo. He became
something of a teacher among his peers in Western New York,
leading life-study sessions and open-air excursions to area
parks and horticultural conservatories for botanical
sketching.
His signature painting style reflects the radical
achievements of modernism, as he absorbed the impressionist
discovery of light, and later cubism and abstraction. A
subtle artist, preoccupied with color, his paintings
carried the spirit of Matisse much the way Richard
Diebenkorn did in California.
Known for his strong draftsmanship and palette, Wise
explored light, color and form through a succession of
problem-focused projects that incorporated old and
contemporary masters into a thoroughly modern body of work.
Wise showed regionally in group shows and, occasionally, in
solo exhibitions. In 1960, he won first prize at the
Western New York Exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, and was awarded many other prizes, grants and
fellowships.
In 1987, again at the Albright-Knox, his work appeared in
“The Wayward Muse: A Historical Survey of Painting in
Buffalo.” In 1994, he was honored with a solo show titled
“Interiors” at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. The
Burchfield-Penney holds more than 40 of his paintings and
drawings in its permanent collection.
An inner light clearly defined his career: Wise was an
artist. He regarded his position at Buffalo State as a
privilege that insulated him from the whims of art
“fashion.”
Now, it is fitting that Wise’s elegant paintings, and his
rich legacy of artistry, are being made available to the
public, that their textured nuance and thoughtful
composition may be appreciated on a wider scale.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for use of
biographical material from
the estate of Roland Wise.
Image: "Interior," 1974, acrylic on canvas, 51 inches x 60 inches.