Last Updated on Thursday, 16 July 2009 14:50 Written by Judy Jacobi Sunday, 31 May 2009 17:28

George Sugarman was a prolific sculptor and painter who disliked labels, believing they oversimplified the complexity of art. Sugarman’s body of work resists classification and oversimplification. He was influenced by Surrealism, Cubism, Baroque sculpture and Abstract Expressionism.

An intellectually vigorous man, he pressed for innovation throughout his career.  Sugarman’s sculptures stood out particularly in light of the minimalism of the sixties.

Many of Sugarman’s sculptures are multi-colored, geometric and biomorphic at the same time. Energizing space with color, Sugarman was known for his expansive “polychrome profusions,” which reflected “the existential disorder of life.”

George Sugarman became an artist later in life. Born in the Bronx, he graduated from City College of New York in 1934. After serving in the United States Navy from 1941-1945, he traveled to Paris to study painting under the GI Bill of Rights, where he studied with sculptor Ossip Zadkine.

Sugarman returned to New York in 1955 where  he began working in laminated wood. He taught carpentry at a private school to  support himself.

In 1961, Sugarman received international recognition when he won second prize for sculptural creativity in the Carnegie International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture.

Over the next 30 years, his output was prodigious and it included thousands of paintings and vividly colored relief collages. In the seventies, Sugarman created numerous large sculptures, commissioned for public spaces in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. He was among the first to promote placing sculpture on the ground without the interference and formality of pedestals. He believed that “public art” should be outdoors, in a natural environment, not indoors, physically isolated. 

Sugarman taught at Hunter College for ten years. He was a visiting associate professor at the Yale University Graduate School of Art. He lectured at many universities including Purdue in West Lafayette in 1975.

His works are among the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Art Institute in Chicago, the Walker Museum in Minneapolis and the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge. Thirty major commissions reside in the United States, Asia and Australia. Sugarman’s work has been the subject of more than 90 solo or group exhibitions.