For over a decade Sidney Laufman was an expatriate living in Paris, and despite the devastation of World War I, it was an exciting place to be a painter. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he did not study at one of the famed academies. Nevertheless, he was successful in participating in multiple exhibitions there, including one alongside his friend and neighbor, Henri Matisse.
Laufman was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and enjoyed drawing as a child. He attended the Cleveland School of Art for a short time before departing for Chicago. He worked alongside his future brothers-in-law in the hotel supply business and attended night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, where, according to him, “I never really saw any art until I went to Chicago when I was twenty years old.” He then moved to New York and took classes at the Art Students League with Robert Henri, describing him in an interview as “magnificent.”
In 1920 the Laufmans left for Paris, where they remained until 1932. He painted in his Paris studio during the summers and plein air landscapes in the south during the winters, mostly landscapes with dominating earth tones. Upon his return to the States, the Depression was in full swing. In 1934 he departed for Key West, Florida, working with the Federal Emergency Relief Agency for five months. While many artists were painting murals at this time, Laufman found it difficult to paint outside because of the heat. His works from this period were mostly small oils on paper. A major hurricane spurred his return to New York in 1935, where the following year he was admitted to the easel painting program of the Works Progress Administration. He maintained his own studio and was required to deliver one painting a month.
Although he considered himself primarily an artist, he taught at the Art Students League from 1938 to 1950. One of his colleagues during this time was Sidney Dickinson. Beginning in the 1940s, Laufman became an active member of the Woodstock, New York, art colony, and frequently taught courses there during the League’s summer school, a program that had been established years earlier by Birge Harrison. Laufman engaged in conferences organized by the Woodstock Artists Association and Artists Equity at the League; in 1948 he headed a session called “The Changing Horizon.” Among the distinguished speakers at the event were dealer Edith Halpert, art historian H.W. Janson, and artist Ben Shahn, who declared “when an artist puts down his credo he puts himself in a very vulnerable position.” Laufman’s stance was a bit more optimistic: “There are such infinite possibilities in a square of white canvas. Anybody with a piece of canvas could turn the work upside down (or right side up)—if he could just find the right shapes and colors.”
Laufman’s career was centered on an itinerant painting schedule: wintering in the south and summering in the north. From 1938–1944 he spent winters in South Carolina–specifically Bluffton and Beaufort–and summers in Vermont. In 1959–1960 he taught at Brandeis University in South Waltham, Massachusetts. Beginning in 1968 he spent winters in Sarasota, Florida, and moved there permanently in 1974. He maintained a busy exhibition schedule which led to his paintings being included in exhibitions across the country. In 1974, at a venue in Naples, Florida, his work was on view along with that by Lamar Dodd and Karl Zerbe. Stylistically, he was a realist, although in the late 1950s and 1960s he experimented with more abstract and expressionist tree compositions. But Laufman’s preferred subject was always landscape, in which trees played a dominant role. “He attempted to reaffirm the value of landscape painting in the history of art. ‘For a landscape is not a mere collection of forms and colors. The merest patch of earth and tree and sky speaks of growing things, and therefore of hope. Landscape represents man’s relation to a world of mystery and poetry and wonder, and will not permit itself to be dehumanized without losing its essential nature. It is the art of the lyric, the contemplative and the humanist as opposed to the misanthropic spirits. and so today, landscape as an art form has been left as the sole repository for those human and social values to which painting may return. It is the dormant, but healthy and hopeful, core in the world of art.”