Edwin Kaufman

Cleveland-born printmaker and painter Edwin Kaufman was an active member of the Cleveland School during the 1930s. His formal art education began at the Cleveland School of Art, where he learned watercolor and portraiture from Henry Keller. Upon graduation in 1929, he studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich and Henry de Waroquier in Paris after winning the Agnes Gund European Traveling Scholarship. In 1930 he exhibited alongside master printmaker Kálmán Kubinyi at the Council Education Alliance in Cleveland and later published a book of etchings with Kubinyi in 1932. During the early years of the Great Depression, Kaufman participated in the Cleveland Print Makers Club, taught tooling and portraiture at the Euclid Avenue Temple, and exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual May Show from 1926 to 1937 with a first prize in watercolor and intaglio in 1935. In 1933, a solo exhibition of his prints and drawings was held at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California. That year, Kaufman also became president of the short-lived International Print Guild in New York City. In 1934, he moved to New York, and by 1936 worked for the Works Progress Administration. His work spans portraiture, city scenes from Cleveland and New York, and New England landscapes. Kaufman’s career was tragically cut short by a car accident that resulted from a bridge collapse in 1939.