Robert O. Preusser

Robert O. Preusser is considered the first Texas “Modernist”. He was born in Houston , TX in 1919. He studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Robert J. Wolff from 1939-1942.

He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA.

Preusser taught at the Houston Museum Fine Arts School, University of Houston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He was invited to teach at MIT by Gyorgy Kepes, who had been one of Preusser’s instructors at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Preusser taught at MIT for 31 years.

In 1952, “LIFE Magazine” asked Edith Halpert, who was the owner and director of the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York, to name ten “Stars of Tomorrow” in the art world. Along with such luminaries as Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles Sheeler, Halpert also picked Robert Preusser.

Today his work can be found in the such collections as Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Preusser died in Boston, MA in 1992.