Werner Groshans

Werner Groshans moved with his family from Germany to the United States at the age of thirteen and began his studies at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art a year later. As a young adult during the Great Depression, he participated in the Works Progress Administration Easel Project for two years, allowing him to develop as an artist without the worry of finding full-time work. By the early 1960s his artwork began to gain recognition, and in 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Groshans often worked from his memory of real places seen in nature, but his strange juxtapositions of objects and figures led William Gerdts, a graduate professor at the City University of New York, to describe his style as "Mysterious Realism."