About Arthur Secunda
Arthur Secunda – Born Nov 12, 1927 Died August 30, 2022
Arthur Secunda was memorialized today September 18, 2022 by his by son David Secunda and family as well as many important people in Arthur’s life who had many interesting remembrances to share. What an accomplished life Arthur Secunda had, for 94 years. There was only one Arthur Secunda, the man and his art.
Arthur Secunda is an internationally renowned artist whose career has spanned eight decades. His one-man shows have been seen worldwide in numerous galleries and museums in France, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Israel, and Japan. In the United States, he is represented in most major museums of the country, including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the UCLA Museum, the Detroit Art Institute, and the Phoenix Museum.
Known for his brilliant collages and striking graphics, Secunda has mastered all types of printmaking, even making his own paper in France and Japan. His impressive body of work includes painting, mixed media, polyester assemblage, ceramics, and welded sculpture. His studies began at the Detroit Art Institute as a teenager and continued in New York at the Art Students League and New York University. After a stint in the Air Force as an artist, he then studied, thanks to the GI bill, in Mexico, Paris, and Italy, with many great artists and teachers, beginning a lifelong propensity for travel– living and working in other countries. For decades, he maintained studios in Paris and LA.
He considers himself a landscape artist and has developed his own iconography in representing nature, the land, and its forms, as well as corresponding inner landscapes. He is known for a specific kind of color gradation and blending of forms in many media. His work tends to oscillate between the serene–striated colors in landscapes–to the expressive, as in many of his oil paintings. After years in Paris, Secunda has maintained a studio in Scottsdale for the last decade–doing what he has done in all of the other places he has lived and worked in the last 50 years–creating imagery. He has worked as a jazz musician–in Paris in the early days to support himself, and as a milkman; as an art critic, lecturer, curator, writer, and publisher. Periodically, he consults at NASA where he is an image visualizer, helping translate scientific data into visual images. Highly respected as a teacher, he will spend August in Lacoste, France teaching a master class in college and the creation of handmade artists’ books. (Secunda has an international following of people who subscribe and collect his dada art “books”.) Next year, he will have a one-man exhibition at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, presenting a never before seen series of expressive portrait monotypes of noted art personalities, after which he will exhibit early Mexican woodcuts at McMasters University in Hamilton, Ontario, in a two-man display with Indian artist Mansaram Panchal.
