1980-81
Louis Schanker began January of 1980 by attending the 50th Anniversary Party for Artists represented in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. Although he was a member of the Ten, a group that protested the policies of the museum in the 1930’s, he was still asked to exhibit in several Whitney shows. In 1946 his first work became part of the permanent collection.
During this year Una Johnson, print curator emeritus at the Brooklyn Museum published her book American Prints and Printmakers. Lou Schanker is cited in several places as a skilled experimenter and pioneer of new techniques.
1980 was also the occasion of American Abstracts Artists The Early Years show at the gallery on 57th street in New York City which featured several pieces by founding member Schanker..
Mediums of Printmaking at the Bethesda Art Gallery, in Maryland included several Schanker woodcuts as it strived to explain the various branches of the field.
The show A Century of American Woodcuts 1850 – 1950 at Associated American Artists included 7 Schanker prints from the 1930’s.
In 1981 Schanker was having a major retrospective of his early oil paintings at the Martin Diamond Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City. Unfortunately as the opening approached Schanker had a heart attack and died just a few blocks away at Lennox Hill Hospital. At the same time his work was also being shown at the Whitney Museum.
Louis Schanker in his Stamford studio, "Treetops," with some of his recent works. During the 70's he worked on the old german workbench using the Dremel tool shown at the far left of this picture to create low relef sculptures on plexiglass. They were then either inked to create prints or tempera oils were applied to create a finished work. The same techniques were used to create a limited number of pieces of jewlery.