Roy Moyer

Groomed from childhood for a life as a concert pianist, Roy Moyer is essentially self-taught as a visual artist. He received undergraduate and graduate academic degrees from Columbia University and, following military service during World War II, studied at the University of Oslo. From 1947 until 1950 Moyer lived in Salonica, Greece, where his first exhibition was held. Moyer served as director of the American Federation of Arts from 1963 until 1972, and is currently chief of art and design for UNICEF. A thematic traditionalist, Moyer paints still lifes, landscapes, and figures with a reductive sense of form, and emphasizes the rhythmic contours rather than details of his subjects. If Moyer's work has a visual precedent, it is the expressive use of line and color characteristic of Edvard Munch, although Moyer seldom seeks the psychological intensity found in the Norwegian expressionist's work. The glowing hues of Moyer's recent paintings create illusions of space through color alone.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)