Morris Kantor

Russian-born Morris Kantor learned to support himself at a very young age when he came to the United States, in 1906. By the time he was twenty, he had saved enough money working in the garment district to enroll at the Independent School of Art in New York. Kantor went on to become a prominent artist and teacher in New York City, where he taught at the Art Students League for thirty years. He continued to travel and study, and in 1928 married fellow artist Martha Ryther, a recognized master of the difficult medium of painting on glass. A prolific artist, Kantor produced a diverse body of work. He explored many different styles, ranging from abstraction to realism, as seen in Synthetic Arrangement (1922) and Baseball at Night (1934), both in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.