Robert Mangold was born on October 12, 1937 in North Tonawanda, New York, near Buffalo. As a youngster, he wanted to be another Norman Rockwell. In high school, he discovered that he had an ability to draw. His teachers encouraged him and he studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art where he enrolled in the school’s illustration department. By his second year Robert Mangold had switched to the fine arts department, intending to become an art teacher. The artist graduated from Cleveland in 1959, and went on to Yale, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1962.

At Yale, Robert Mangold met and married Sylvia Plimack, a fellow painting student; they were married in 1961 and had two sons, James and Andrew. They moved to New York City, and Robert Mangold worked as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art and then settled into a permanent teaching position at the School of Visual Arts. They moved to Washingtonville, New York which proved to be the eventual landing place for their family and their work. The artist also taught painting at Hunter College, Skowhegan Summer Art School, Cornell University Summer Art School and the Yale-Norfolk Summer Art School. Robert Mangold completed numerous shaped canvases, that for him demonstrate the interrogation between line, color and form.

Sources include:
John Gruen in ARTnews, Summer 1987
Contemporary Artists, St. Martin’s Press, 1977, Colin Naylor, editor.

Compiled and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher of Laguna Woods, California.

Biography from the Archives of AskART.