Abraham Rattner

Abraham Rattner belonged to the generation of Americans the First World War delivered to France: born in Poughkeepsie in 1893, he served overseas, returned to Paris on an art fellowship around 1920, and stayed for two decades. Montparnasse formed him — he absorbed cubism, expressionism, and the School of Paris's chromatic daring, working toward the style that became his signature: figures and sacred subjects built from panes of burning color, canvases that look lit from behind like stained glass. The war he had seen, and the one he saw coming, pushed his art steadily toward the prophetic.

The fall of France sent him home in 1940, and almost immediately into the strangest road trip in these pages: he shared long stretches of Henry Miller's 1940–41 tour of America in the old Buick — the journey behind The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, two returned expatriates taking the measure of a country that had grown foreign to them both. Rattner's later career answered the century's darkness with light in earnest: major religious commissions and stained glass, most famously the monumental 'Let There Be Light' window for Chicago's Loop Synagogue. He died in New York in 1978.