Lunch at Ratner’s

Born in Fall River, Massachusetts, Howard Kanovitz began his artistic career as a jazz musician. He took up painting in 1949 while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students League’s summer school in Woodstock, New York. After moving to New York, Kanovitz initially found success as an abstract expressionist painter in the 1950s and the early 1960s, associating with such contemporaries as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. After his father’s death, Kanovitz began creating works inspired by family photographs, pioneering the photorealist style that influenced many of his successors. His later works continued in this figurative style.