Michael Hafftka is an American figurative

expressionist Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

painter living in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. His work is represented in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 F ...

New York Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of the ...

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

Carnegie Museum of Art The Carnegie Museum of Art, is an art museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was at what is now the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsbur ...

New York Public Library The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress ...

McNay Art Museum The McNay Art Museum, founded in 1954 in San Antonio, is the first modern art museum in the U.S. state of Texas. The museum was created by Marion Koogler McNay's original bequest of most of her fortune, her important art collection and her 24-roo ...

Housatonic Museum of Art The Housatonic Museum of Art is a museum at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The museum's collection is displayed throughout the college campus and in the Burt Chernow Galleries, which also hosts visiting exhibitions. Coll ...

Arizona State University Art Museum The Arizona State University Art Museum is an art museum operated by Arizona State University, located on its main campus in Tempe, Arizona. The Art Museum has some 12,000 objects in its permanent collection and describes its primary focuses as c ...

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of char ...

, and

Yeshiva University Museum The Yeshiva University Museum is a teaching museum and the cultural arm of Yeshiva University. Along with the American Jewish Historical Society, the American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, New York and the YIVO Institute for Jewish ...

. Hafftka was born in Manhattan (1953) to Eva and Simon Hafftka, European refugees and

Holocaust survivors Holocaust survivors are people who survived the Holocaust, defined as the persecution and attempted annihilation of the Jews by Nazi Germany and Axis powers, its allies before and during World War II in Europe and North Africa. There is no unive ...

. He was raised in the Bronx and attended public schools. Hafftka designed covers for Urizen Books, including ''Detour'', ''Wedding Feast'' and ''Circuits'', by

Michael Brodsky Michael Mark Brodsky (born Aug 2, 1948) is a scientific/medical editor, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels '' Xman'' and '' ***'', as well as for his translation of Samuel Beckett's '' Eleuthéria''. ...

. Kevin Begos of Guignol Books published Hafftka's drawings in 1982. His first one-person show was at Art Galaxy. Among the New York galleries that subsequently have featured his work are: the Rosa Esman Gallery, the Aberbach Gallery, the Mary Ryan Gallery, and the DiLaurenti Gallery. He has also exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. The

mounted a retrospective in October 2004.

at the

Center for Jewish History The Center for Jewish History is a partnership of five Jewish history, scholarship, and art organizations in New York City: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute New York, Yeshiva University Museum, ...

in New York held a solo exhibition ''I of the Storm'', a major show of recent works, March through August 2009.

Illustrated Books

* ''Conscious/Unconscious'', short stories and drawings by Michael Hafftka, Six Gallery Press 2007, * ''In the Penal Colony'', a short story by

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...

illustrated by Michael Hafftka, Limited Editions Club 1987,

ASIN Asin Thottumkal (born 26 October 1985), known mononymously as Asin, is a former Indian actress who appeared predominantly in Tamil, Hindi and Telugu films. She is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer. She has received three Filmfare Awards. She beg ...

B003Y7OW8W * ''The Terror of Loch Ness'', a novel by Che Elias, illustrated by Michael Hafftka, Six Gallery Press 2007, * ''Circular Stairs, Distress in the Mirrors'', poems by

Peter Klappert Peter Klappert (born 1942 in Rockville Centre, New York) is an American poet. Life He grew up in West Hempstead, New York, and Rowayton, Connecticut. He graduated from Cornell University and the University of Iowa, with an M.A. and an M.F.A. H ...

with art by Michael Hafftka, Six Gallery Press 2008, * ''To Die Next To You'', poems by

Rodger Kamenetz Rodger Kamenetz (born 1950) is an American poet and author best known for ''The Jew in the Lotus'' (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, ...

with art by Michael Hafftka, Six Gallery Press, 2013,

References

External links

Official website@hafftka on Twitterhafftka on Instagram
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hafftka, Michael 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters 21st-century American male artists 1953 births Living people 20th-century American Jews DeWitt Clinton High School alumni Jewish painters 20th-century American printmakers Painters from New York (state) 21st-century American Jews 20th-century American male artists Neo-expressionist artists

Illustrated Books

References

Further reading

External links