A native New Yorker and long time resident of Leonia, NJ, Elias Friedensohn began exhibiting in 1951. Over the course of four decades, he had more than 40 one-person shows of paintings and sculpture.
After graduating from the High School of Music and Art in 1942, Friedensohn attended the Tyler School of Fine Arts at Temple University. He served with the army in Europe during World War II, received the B.A. from Queens College (CUNY) in 1948 and studied at the Art Institute of NYU from 1949 to 1951. He joined the Queens College Art Department in 1959 and retired as Professor Emeritus of Art in 1987.
In addition to one-person exhibits in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Berkeley, Friedensohn’s work has appeared in major national shows at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, The Whitney Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution and many others. His paintings and sculpture are represented in many permanent collections, including the Whitney Museum, the Sara Roby Foundation, the Minneapolis Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum. Articles on the work have appeared in Art News, Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications.
He has been the recipient of several prestigious awards including a Guggenheim grant, a Fulbright to Italy, and American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and grants from the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Right before his death he completed the manuscript for a book entitled “The Secrets of Elias Friedensohn.” To obtain an abbreviated version of that unpublished volume, contact doris.friedensohn@verizon.net