BROOKLYN-BORN PAINTER Bernard Krigstein (1919-1990) graduated with honors from Brooklyn College in 1940 with a B.A. in Fine Art. For the next fifty years he maintained an active career, constantly altering his style to best serve his subjects.

Krigstein’s first professional experience came with the Federal Arts Project of the W.P.A., copying iconic American paintings (such as Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington) for schools, post offices, and federal buildings. When that agency lost its funding in 1941, the artist tried several commercial endeavors before winding up in the young industry of comic books in early 1943. After serving in the army for two years in World War II, he returned to the comics field in 1945, learned his craft well, and by the early 1950s was creating some of the most distinguished graphic narratives of his generation.

His 1955 landmark tale of a Nazi Holocaust survivor, “Master Race,” has been referred to as the “Citizen Kane” of comic book stories. As Art Spiegelman writes in the New Yorker (7/22/02): “[Krigstein] disdained shortcuts and easy solutions, and replaced the cartoonist’s vocabulary of sweat marks and action lines with a painter’s language of composition and form. It’s as if the other cartoonists were expressively drawing Yiddish while Krigstein eloquently drew Hebrew.”

Krigstein maintained this painterly approach in his next field, commercial illustration, before beginning a new career in 1964 as an instructor at New York’s High School of Art and Design. A steady income provided the freedom to fully concentrate on painting and to maintain a Union Square studio.

His inspiration drew from both his native urban environs and the Adirondack and Berkshire region, where he painted each summer until his final years.

While Krigstein’s art is rooted in realism, it ventures at times into almost total abstraction: “I became involved in painting directly from nature, what you might call realistic. If I use the term “realistic,” I want you to understand that I don’t think that it has any real meaning . . . the word “realism” is very much abused. They’re kind of realistic, but I’m very interested in abstract values.”

Synthesizing the real with the abstract was Krigstein’s artistic objective, and the work he left us represents that pursuit.