Allen Russell Saalburg (1899–1987) was an American painter, illustrator, and screen printer born in Rochelle, Illinois.[1] His father was the cartoonist Charles W. Saalburg. He studied at the Art Students League of New York before working in advertising and magazine illustration in the 1920s. A business trip he took to Paris in 1929 with his wife, sketching runway fashion for department stores, led to his first gallery show, at the esteemed Bernheim-Jeune, with his second in New York at a gallery of Louis Bouché.[2] During the 1930s he had regular shows of screenprints on glass (his specialty) and wall panels, and directed a mural division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), in New York City, overseeing murals in the Central Park Zoo and other New York locations.[3] His murals in the Arsenal of Central Park survive today.[2]
In 1942, the United States Flag Association awarded him the Cross of Honor and Patriotic Service Cross for his painting Flag Over Mt. Vernon.[4] By the 1940s Saalburg had established his own press. He was married to fashion designer Muriel King, and later to Mary Faulconer, a painter.[5] In 1947 after divorce and the loss of his child by his first wife, he moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, re-establishing his printing operation as the Canal Press, for the Delaware Canal nearby.[2]
He died in Flemington, New Jersey, at the age of 88.[3] His works can be found in the institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1][6]
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