Arthur La Vinger

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1902, La Vinger studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Art before immigrating to the United States in the 1920s. His work quickly drew attention in Detroit, where critics praised both his technical mastery and his distinctive voice as a painter.

In 1933, Florence Davies, Art Editor of the Detroit Sunday Times, wrote:

“A. A. La Vinger is more than a clever draftsman and colorist. He is a philosopher whose observations are touched with irony and humor.”

Two years earlier, Ralph Holmes of the Detroit Free Press described him as:

“A painter with something to say and a terrific ability to say it. Of the hundreds—rather thousands—of pictures which have hung in our galleries in the past ten years, no painter has made so deep an impression on my memory as La Vinger, who has the fine painter’s instinctive sense of ‘organization’ so that his pictures hang together, has the brutal power, the tender sympathy, or the sly humor…”