Paul Meltsner was just another worker bee for the Federal Art Project in the 1930s until he found his calling: dramatic arts!

Or, rather, painting portraits of celebrities in the dramatic arts. But before any of that happened, Meltsner was just a young lad roaming the streets of New York City, attending school in Harlem, followed by a stint at the National Academy of Design. He did illustrations for Coronet and Bachelor Magazines. He became a Lewis Comfort Tiffany Foundation fellow and joined the Society for Independent Artists, which sounds like an oxymoron. During the height of the Great Depression, Meltsner toured ‘Murica in an old Ford, because what is more American than a road trip in an old Ford? 

“Much of the content of his early work reflect the social and industrial ferment of that time. The large, clear areas of color, the simplified, angular forms, and the strong lines of his work remind one of the River Rouge paintings of Diego Rivera,” which just so happened to be easily reproduced, and could make Meltsner many dollars during a time that relatively few dollars were being made by the American public. That is how Meltsner could provide for his daughter, Marcella and their wire-haired fox terrier, Van Gogh, both of whom have made appearances in his paintings. One such painting was bought by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris but was confiscated when the Nazis occupied France because Meltsner was Jewish. Now the only copy of the painting exists and hangs in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

After Meltsner moved passed all the Federal Arts Project stuff, he told his daughter and little dog to scram so he could paint people like Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese-born Brazilian Broadway star, samba singer and dancer, who was nicknamed the “Brazilian Bombshell.” Poor Marcella and Van Gogh. They never had a chance. He also painted Gypsy Rose Lee, Gertrude Lawrence, Lynn Fontaine, John Barrymore, Marian Anderson, and by far his fav, Martha Graham, the American modern dancer and choreographer. After Meltsner decided that his painting life had come to an end, he moved to Woodstock, New York where he died in 1966, at the age of 61.