“A fine juicy painter who has for many years retained his figurative approach through movements thick and thin.  Throughout, his skill as a vivid colorist and paint-handler prevails.”

Grace Gluck, NY Times

A member of the second generation of the New York School, Paul Georges took elements from Abstract Expressionism—such as the physical immediacy of the paint—and applied them to the more traditional field of figurative painting. One of Georges's artistic quests has been to reach a style of figurative representation that is "completely natural yet also timeless."

Georges follows in the Western tradition of monumental figure painting yet maintains a wholly unique, personal, and highly independent feeling in his works.  In a recent review, Grace Glueck, NY Times art critic writes of this Portland Oregon native, “A fine juicy painter who has for many years retained his figurative approach through movements thick and thin.  Throughout, his skill as a vivid colorist and paint-handler prevails.”

Stanley Grand, Art Historian, University of Wisconsin writes, “Georges constantly provokes by confusing our expectations.  With Duchampian irony, he strips classical themes of false gravity.  His ambitious, freewheeling frequently bombastic, robust manner makes his paintings difficult and at times perverse.  His position toward the tradition remains ambiguous and contradictory.  George’s painting consists of many layers engaged in a never ending struggle and not always polite dialogue.

Georges uses color itself to create pictorial space.  Cadmium red advances while the green recedes. Georges’ color, freed of purely descriptive ends, demonstrates and reinforces his link to his former teachers: Hans Hofmann and Fernand Leger.  Unlike more traditional artists who develop the composition fully in preliminary drawings and oil sketches, Georges paints wet into wet in the Venetian manner allowing drips and other happy accidents abound.  He is as content to paint everyday views, perhaps from his garden as he is to invoke mythology for the simple joy of moving paint about the canvas.”

Born in 1923 to a Russian Jewish mother and Greek father in Portland, Oregon, he attended the Sunday Hebrew school and worked in his father's laundry business. He went to the University of Oregon in Eugene, and in 1947, was in Provincetown in the summer of 1947 studying with Hans Hofmann and meeting Jane Freilicher, Paul Resika, and Larry Rivers.

In 1949, he went to Paris where he studied with Fernand Leger whose circus performer paintings became a source of inspiration for Georges's later genre paintings. He met his wife Lisette, whom he married in England in 1950, and in 1952, the couple returned to New York, and his style swung between abstraction and explicit figurative painting.

During the 1960s, he was very much outside the mainstream of New York painting, although he was in several of the Whitney Biennials. From that time, his work has been a mix of a highly personal style that embraces surrealism, realism, and abstraction and a variety of themes including allegory and religion.

An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Janet Lehr Fine Arts' spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs  by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.

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View synoptic biography below.