Alan Gussow

Alan Gussow was born in New York City in 1931. He grew up on Long Island, and graduated from Middlebury College. A winner of the Prix de Rome in 1953, he painted in Rome and traveled widely throughout Europe and the Middle East until he returned to New York in 1955. An avid environmentalist, he resigned as a department chairman at the Parsons School of Design in 1968 to devote himself to painting and working on behalf of the besieged natural environment. His testimony in the federal case on the proposed Hudson River Expressway established criteria for evaluating scenic beauty. The Portland Museum of Fine Arts presented a major retrospective of his works in 1970.  In 2009 New York’s Babcock Galleries mounted a major exhibition of his work and published a complete catalog raisonne of his oils and watercolors. Gussow lived in Congers, New York less than one mile from the Hudson River. He died in 1997.