HENRY SCHNAKENBERG (1892-1970)
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Biography • Henry Schnakenberg (1892-1970)
Henry Ernest Schnakenberg was born in 1892 in New Brighton, Staten Island, New York. In his youth, Schnakenberg attended the Staten Island Academy. In 1913 he began taking night classes at the Art Students League. That same year the Armory Show brought new ideas into the New York art world, influencing many artists, including Schnakenberg. The next season Schnakenberg began art classes full-time at the League, which continued for three more years, under the instruction of Kenneth Hayes Miller.
In 1917 Schnakenberg exhibited two works at the Society of Independent Artists and joined the Army Medical Corps with America’s entry into World War I. He served for two years in the US and in France. Upon his discharge in 1919, Schnakenberg returned quickly to art and was given an exhibition, alongside Joseph Stella, at the Whitney Studio Club. Schnakenberg taught at the Art Students League from 1923 to 1925; he was later made president of the League in 1932.
In addition to teaching and writing, Schnakenberg continued to exhibit regularly at the Society of Independent Artists (1920-1941), as well as museum invitationals at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1921-1957), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1923-1952), the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery (1919-1953). Schnakenberg was invited to participate in the Carnegie International from 1920 through 1949. Beginning in 1932, Schnakenberg exhibited regularly at his lifetime dealer C. W. Kraushaar Galleries in New York City. He also exhibited at the New York’s World Fair in 1939, along with his old teacher and mentor Kenneth Hayes Miller. Throughout his career, Schnakenberg wrote essays and reviews for art magazines, primarily The Arts.
Schnakenberg was awarded two mural commissions by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts for post offices in Amsterdam, New York (1939) and Fort Lee, New Jersey (1941). After 1941 Henry Schnakenberg moved out of the city to Newtown, Connecticut. He spent many of his summers in Manchester, Vermont painting the sunlit valleys, covered bridges, and intimate farmlands of New England.
Schnakenberg was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Art Students League, the Society of Independent Artists, and the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers, where he served as treasurer. Henry Schnakenberg died in Newtown, Connecticut in 1970.