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Biography
In 1933 Robert Schellin received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Milwaukee State Teachers College (now UW-Milwaukee), and in 1948 he completed his Master of Arts degree at UW-Madison. His art instructors were Gustave Moeller, Elsa Ulbricht and Robert von Neumann. He studied at the Layton School of Art. and Columbia University where he was a student of Hans Hoffman and Frederic Taubes. It was here that he became interested in the power of abstraction to express emotion through color, texture, line and form, turning to ceramics as his preferred medium. Nevertheless Schellin is known as a painter, ceramist and teacher.
The Federal Works Progress Administration Art Project employed Schellin in 1933 after graduation. That same year, he was a member of Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors, and won first prize in their 1933 exhibition for an oil painting called Minerva. A mural that Schellin painted in 1935 for a hall at Milwaukee State Teachers College caused controversy through the inclusion of a female nude and direct social criticism of the Capitalist nature.
In 1937 and 1938 he was a professor of fine arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and from 1945 until he retired in 1975, he was also head of the ceramics department
Selected Exhibitions
1937 19th Annual Exhibition - Wisconsin Society of Applied Arts
1939 Milwaukee State Teachers College - one man show
1939-1970 Milwaukee Art Institute - exhibited intermittently during these years
1943 Milwaukee State Teachers College, Survey Show
1944 Art Institute of Chicago
1946 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
1952-53 Wisconsin Designer-Craftsmen (major winner)
1974 Charles Allis Art Library, Milwaukee Paintings of the 1920's and 30's
1975 University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Fine Arts Gallery -
Retrospective of our Decades (honors his retirement as art professor) - UWM Fine Arts
© 10/23/2007 Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin 6/2/2010