Skip to content

William Einstein

b. 1907,Saint-Louis, United States
d. 1972, Paris, France

William Einstein was an American painter and stained glass designer, best known for his work in abstraction. Born in Saint-Louis, Missouri, he studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts before moving to Paris at the age of twenty in 1927. There, he studied under Fernand Léger and Amedee Ozenfant at the Academie Moderne, immersing himself in the city’s avant-garde culture. During this time, he formed relationships with influential figures like Giacometti, Duchamp, and Soutine. Einstein was an active participant in the Abstraction-Création group, a collective that championed non-representational art, and regularly exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants. His four year stay in New York during the 1930s was a formative period; he worked at the An American Place Gallery and co-curated the 1936 John Marin Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art with Georgia O'Keeffe. After serving in World War II, he returned to Paris in 1946, where he continued to make significant contributions to the modernist movement. Although his work was not widely known in the United States, Einstein remained an important figure within the European art world throughout his career.