Robert Broderson

Broderson, who served in the Air Force during World War II and later received grants from Duke University (where he taught from 1957 until 1964), traveled widely throughout Europe, Mexico, and Africa. A painter of figures in bleak landscapes, Broderson pays little attention to the specifics of place. His stark, often distorted, figures hold strange birds and beasts and are darkly set against dramatically light skies. His images are enigmatic and haunting, offering unlikely symbolic connections that defy rational explanation. Broderson executes his figural works with a painterly freedom reminiscent of his early days as an Abstract Expressionist.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)