Fred Staloff (1924-2019)

The Butler Institute is honored and privileged to present the remarkable paintings of Fred Staloff. Staloff’s career, which spans more than six decades, was a testament to the quality and staying power of American painting, and a wonderful reminder that painting continues to be the most vital of the visual arts.

Fred Staloff was blessed with an eye for composition and one can be comfortable in classifying his arts as formalistic. And while his career demonstrates the classic twists and turns of most of the great painters from history, he remained devoted to creating an exciting visual experience for the viewer. His approach to painting can be said to derive from the visually oriented work of Paul Cézanne, yet it also owes much to the emotional energies of both the European and the American brands of Expressionism. His painterly work does indeed make reference to the spontaneity that we associate with expressionist painting; but in reality, the careful placement of the visual elements of line, shape, texture and color is what guided and motivated him.