Robert von Neumann received a scholarship to study art from 1910-1914 at the United State Schools for Free and Applied Arts in Berlin under Bruno Paul and Emil Orlik. After serving in the German army in World War I, he taught art in Berlin.

Von Neumann settled in Milwaukee in 1926 and became a naturalized US citizen in 1933. He worked as a lithographer and was on the art staff of the Milwaukee Journal. In 1933, he went to Gloucester, Massachusetts to study at the Earnest Thurm School of Art under Hans Hoffmann.

He also taught at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee from 1929-1930 and later at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wisconsin State Teachers College (1930-1959) and the Ox-Bow Summer School of Painting at Saugatuck, Michigan. Von Neumann was a member of the Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors, and its president in 1931 and 1932. He was also one of the founding members of the Wisconsin Watercolor Society.

Much like the American Regionalist work of the 30s and 40s, von Neumann’s drawings, paintings, pastels, etchings, mezzotints, and lithographs illustrated the virtues of the common man hard at work. Von Neumann was an extraordinary printmaker who taught printmaking to many others while continuing to produce his own work in quantity. He is best known for his shoreline scenes filled with bulky and heroic fishermen. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee bestowed an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts upon him in 1972, and in 2007 he was one of the recipients of the Wisconsin Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Biography by David Barnett Gallery