Robert Angeloch’s appointment in 1964 as a landscape painting instructor at the Art Students League’s Woodstock summer school helped spark a resurgence in a long-neglected genre, leading to major exhibitions and his recognition as a bridge between two generations of artists.
Angeloch was a native of Queens, the New York City borough where he was born in 1922. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. After the war, he studied landscape painting with Fiske Boyd in New Hampshire and attended the Art Students League of New York, where his instructors included Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Martin Lewis, and Bernard Klonis.
In the summer of 1950, Angeloch studied in Woodstock at the Art Students League of New York summer school with Kuniyoshi, Arnold Blanch, John Pike, and Zygmunt Menkes. The artist settled in town, and married painter and printmaker Nancy Summers, the daughter of longtime art colony landscape painter and illustrator Dudley Gloyne Summers.
“Angeloch became the bridge between Woodstock’s magnificent history of landscape painters and the next wave of serious painters,” according to Kate McGloughlin, a painter, printmaker and teacher at the Woodstock School of Art.
His 1964 appointment to the league’s summer school as a teacher of outdoor painting reflected the success of private landscape classes Angeloch ran in the summers from 1961-1963, initially at his studio off Glasco Turnpike and then at the Woodstock Playhouse. Nancy Summers alternated teaching morning and afternoon sessions.
“Outdoor classes are conducted in different areas of the countryside which provide stimulating subject matter and a selection of varied topographical forms from which to choose,” including mountains, fields, trees, hills, rocks, streams, wood interiors and lakes, according to a brochure for the 1963 class. Another brochure noted that the local landscape had long attracted artists, many of whom stayed for good.
Angeloch opened the Paradox Gallery on lower Mill Hill Road in 1975, featuring artists associated with the Woodstock School of Landscape Painting, many of whom by then had become forgotten or neglected.
Paradox was a showplace for landscapes by John William Bentley, Charles Rosen, Frank Swift Chase, Neil Ives, Zulma Steele as well as for Angeloch’s own landscapes. In 1978, Angeloch organized a series of three consecutive exhibitions devoted to Woodstock landscape painters past and present.
Angeloch was “on the threshold” between the older Woodstock school and younger artists, according to writer, painter and publisher Raymond J. Steiner.
Among Angeloch’s earliest pupils was Paula Nelson, who received a Ford Foundation scholarship to attend the school in 1966 and who went on to a long and close involvement with the development of the Woodstock School of Art, including serving as its president and director. Classes drew as many as 60 people, she said, noting Angeloch’s talent and enthusiasm for bringing students together.
Angeloch derived most of his landscapes from the mountains, forests, and streams of the Catskill Preserve. In his more realistic landscapes Angeloch usually favored earthy or muted colors to bright or greenish ones, finding them more congenial to his conception of nature.
On the spot, “you’re much more concerned with the local colors, the exact colors and textures and form that gives the mood,” he said. “When I’m on location, I just react to what’s there. Very rarely do I consciously try to eliminate or emphasize. I let nature take its course. However, when I’m more removed from the subject by removing it from nature, I have abstracted it to some degree. I have made choices.”
In some of Angeloch’s more abstract canvases of the 1950s such as Trees, which pictures rocks and trees reflected in a Catskill streambed, he reimagined his palette and created bold eye-catching forms and patterns that recall the art of his former teacher Fiske Boyd in their sense of fluidity, motion and lively overlapping of elements in nature.
Angeloch travelled often to New England and Great Britain in search of fresh perspectives, leading to solo exhibitions that featured a variety of locations.
The artist frequently ventured to Monegan Island in Maine. In Harbor Fog he chose a dramatic point of view, emphasized the foggy weather conditions, reduced his palette primarily to tones of gray and yellow and pared down landscape forms to their basic shape and structure.
In addition to his landscape paintings, Angeloch produced remarkably detailed sketchbooks featuring outdoor studies, notations and reminders for later oil paintings. He created a variety of painting and drawing kits that allowed him to work outdoors in almost any medium he found suitable.
Bruce Weber is an American Art historian and board member for the Historical Society of Woodstock.