Albert Patecky

Albert Patecky

Patecky, Albert

Mancelona 1906

Portland

painter

Northwest artist

Oregon artist

Born and educated in the Midwest, Albert Patecky arrived in Portland in 1928. He studied with local artist Sydney Bell in the early 1930s and then worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph during the Depression and war years. His work received attention when he began studying with Peter Sheffers in 1939. J.D. Cleaver in The Artists Patecky: A Place in History, recounts fifty awards at various exhibits between 1942 and 1948. His landscape and marine work after 1940 showed new clarity and confidence as a result of his association with Sheffers. An active participant with the Oregon Society of Artists, he served as President in the mid-1940s. Patecky's entry in one of the OSA's shows, Oregon Shipyard Shanty, shows grim times near the St. Johns community outside Portland. Other entries featured circus sketches and rural subject matter.

In 1945 Patecky studied at the Art Students League in New York. Here his traditional schooling gave way to experimentation with Cubism and Abstraction. When he returned to Portland, he opened a studio and shared quarters with the Attic Sketch group. In 1948 he opened the Patecky Studio Gallery that represented many of the well-known painters of the time: Sydney Bell, Louis Bunce, Ted Christensen Jr., Bernard Geiser, William Givler, Charles Heaney, Alice Hutchinson, Clyde Keller, Percy Manser, C.S. Price, Ed Quigley, Howard Sewall, Menalkas Selander, Amanda Snyder, and Mildred Warner, among others.

The decade of the 1950s was very productive: he gained an international reputation in the Non-Objective movement and appeared in over one hundred exhibitions nationally and world-wide. It was at this time that he began teaching, and joined in a partnership with artist Viktor Von Pribosic as founder and director of the Creative Art Workshop. He later taught in Portland and Vancouver, Washington schools and privately. Patecky was in demand as a lecturer and juror of exhibitions. In Oregon he was best known for his monoprints.

In 1952 Patecky and Maude Kerns, who had also exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim), collaborated in an unusual experimental performance of Hear the Painting. It featured visual images on stage with musicians and singers behind curtains. The interest in music could be attributed to his long marriage to and partnership with his wife Blanche, a noted musician and artist. Their son Ken was also a noted sculptor. Patecky's work reflected Oregon's people, climate, and landscape over a long period that saw his style change from realistic to non-objective.

Artist biography reproduced with permission from the authors, Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859-1959), Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit.

Male

Associate of: Maude Kerns (American, 1876-1965)

Associate of: Don Kunz (American, 1932-2001)