Hugh Gumpel
February 3, 1926 – May 2, 2011
Hugh Gumpel, artist, 85, passed away on May 2, 2011, in Rockport, Maine.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Morris Gumpel and Helen Stapleton Gumpel. He grew up in Mamaroneck, N.Y, where he learned to draw and paint, especially the boats and shipyards that were so near at hand. Before entering the U.S. Navy in 1943, he studied with George Grosz at the Art Students League.
He enlisted in the Navy in World War II at the age of 17. He served in the Pacific as a signalman on the USS Eldorado, the flagship for the operations in Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was on watch on the morning of February 23, 1945, when he spotted the raising of the first flag on Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima . He called out to the other signalmen and the word quickly spread to the entire Pacific fleet, with all the ships blowing their horns at once.
After the completion of his service in 1947, he attended Columbia University. In 1951 he went to Europe, where he attended the Grande Chaumière art school in Paris, painted and traveled.
Returning home, he married Dorothy Werner and they raised their family in Mamaroneck.
He exhibited nationally and internationally, taking many prizes and awards. He had numerous one-man shows in New York City and elsewhere, and he has shown in Paris, London, Germany, Mexico and Canada. His work is found in public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. His major commissions include a mural for the Public Works Administration building in Albany , N.Y. He was a longtime member of both the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society.
He taught painting and drawing for many years at the National Academy School and the State University of New York at Purchase, N.Y., among other places. As a teacher he was inspiring as well as humorous and kind.
Throughout his life Hugh experimented with mediums and techniques. His work was bold and innovative, graceful and subtle. His skill as a watercolorist was formidable. His subject matter ranged from landscape and cityscape to still life and the figure. In the last decade of his life, his work became more cerebral, more surreal, and musical in its structure and sense of movement – a kind of world between worlds.
“How precious to me are your designs, O God; how vast the sum of them! Were I to count, they would outnumber the sands. To finish, I would need eternity.” (Psalm 139)
He was predeceased by his brothers Julius and Morris, Jr., and his sister, Helene Brauninger. He is survived by his wife, Virginia Peckham; his brother, Dr. Roy C. Gumpel and his wife Jane of Pawcatuck, Conn. ; his daughter, Carolyn Gumpel, of Mamaroneck; his son, David Gumpel of Los Angeles; and three grandsons, David Gumpel, Jr., Zachary Gumpel and Breandan Carroll.
May 2011