American artist Richard Engelbrecht Schiff, born in 1947, is a Life Member of the Art Students League of New York. His article on Will Barnet appeared along with his portrait of his former teacher in Fine Arts Magazine Spring 2009. Schiff was the only minor ever placed in an adult painting class at the League back in 1963, where he began his studies under Ernest Fiene. Schiff became Fiene's Class Monitor in 1964 and remained such until Fiene's untimely passing in summer of 1965. In the autumn of 1965 Schiff began studies under Will Barnet. His "Self-Portrait" of 1966 won the Student Concours prize and was reproduced in the League catalogue for 1967.

After that Schiff was taken seriously ill and had to give up his studio at 35 Morton Street in Greenwich Village, and return home. Recuperating in the spring of 1967 he returned to his studies at the League and a drawing he had made of the Window in his studio the preceding fall was reproduced for the Summer League catalogue that year. Will Barnet borrowed the imagery employed by Schiff, a Window and a tree limb seen beyond, into much of the work he did in late 1967 and on, to the present.

Schiff had moved to two-dimensional abstraction by 1968, but always knew that history safely proved him the originator of this use of nature's imagery in a hard edge style, that made Barnet a successful print maker in the 1970’s.  

This influence over his teacher was apparent in a studio visit made in summer of 1966 to Will Barnet's studio. Along with other class members, William McCain, Terrence Bilotti, and Keith Althaus, they saw that all the canvasses in Barnet's studio were turned to the wall. “We were all left alone for a few minutes before Mr. Barnet came in. McCain, always the jokester, takes it on himself to turn the pictures around, revealing startlingly similar images to many of the paintings I had made in the Barnet class. They all said so, and that was when Mr. Barnet came in and admonished McCain for disturbing the layout in his studio.” Everyone was somewhat deflated after that. Schiff rallied and went to Amsterdam, Holland with his new wife, Denise Steinberg-Schiff.

From a studio in Amsterdam and one in Delft, under the guidance of Professor Dr. N.R.A. Vroom, Director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and Minister of Culture to Her Majesty Queen Wilhelmina, Schiff developed a theory of color related to 2 dimensional painting that he shared with the senior painting students.

Returning to America in late 1969 to Greenwich Village, Schiff shared a studio with American painter Michael C. Pavao, a colleague he had met in the League. He was picked up by Avanti Galleries on Park Avenue by directors Frances Wynshaw and Roma Gerard. Schiff had one man shows at Avanti in 1970, 71, and 72. It was at one of those shows he struck up an acquaintance with Harry Holtzman. Schiff was a student of the De Stijl movement founded by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, whom Holtzman had brought to New York at the outbreak of WWII. Holtzman became Mondrian’s heir.

In 1972 Schiff divorced from his wife and lived in the Ansonia Hotel until1974. That was when Schiff moved to Toms River, NJ to go into business with his only brother Walter Earle Schiff, deceased in 1995. Schiff met Mary Jean Marshall, a college student working toward a theatre degree who was working in Toms River the summer of 1976 as a waitress. They moved in together and were together until 1986.

In 1992 Schiff was reintroduced to Mary Elizabeth Barnet, eldest daughter of his teacher. Her mother Mary Sinclair had married Barnet in 1934. She had Mary in 1950 and in 1952 left Barnet for Joshua Epstein, a Doctor and painter as well. Barnet is the father of Mary and Margaret, as evidenced by his name on their birth certificates as natural father.

In her old age Mary Sinclair Barnet told Schiff, “Will would not stop haunting me. There was nothing I said or did that would stop him from following me and begging me to come back. I finally told him the girls, (Mary and her sister Margaret Rose) were not his. That finally sent him packing”, she said. To this day Will Barnet is under the impression that the two daughters he had with his first wife are not his, when indeed they are. “I always thought will would come back for his daughters, but he never did.” Sinclair felt badly that this had caused an unnecessary alienation from the girls, and did so until she died.

Years later Mary Elizabeth Barnet, recently separated from her husband of 10 years was staying at her Mother’s, in Union City, NJ, in 1991. Mary is a lifelong poet of great reputation, and the Senior Editor of PoetryMagazine.com, since it’s inception in 1996. She had met Schiff when she was 16 and he 19, at the Museum of Modern Art, but nothing had ever come of it. So when they met they remembered that this had happened before and this time it meant everything, for they were married not long after.

Schiff and his wife continue to live and work in a barn first built in 1836. Schiff has work in the Jerusalem Museum of Fine Art and the collection of the United States Air Force. His work is in many private collections worldwide. His last shows were at Gilford Gallery in Manhattan in 1991, as well as the Jewish Community Center Gallery in Deal New Jersey. In that year Schiff also showed work with Michael C. Pavao at the Robert Baum Gallery in Sea Bright and the Kevin Cooper Gallery in Jersey City.

Schiff’s work and that of others can be viewed at his web site www.richardschiff.com .

Mary Barnet-Schiff's poetry can be read at www.marybarnet.com and there you can also download a copy of her last book The New American, at no charge.