Robert Schellin

(1910-1985)

Robert Schellin was born in Akron, Ohio in 1910 and moved with his parents to Milwaukee in 1924.  He received his bachelor of arts degree from the old Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1933 and a master of arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His art instructors included Gustave Moeller, Elsa Ulbricht, and Robert von Neumann.

Schellin won first prize in the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptures competition in 1933 for an oil painting titled “Minerva.”  The painting was later presented to the college by that year’s graduating class.

In 1935, Schellin was the center of public controversy when two of his social-protest murals containing nude female figures were covered up as part of the widely publicized “battle of the nudes” on the Milwaukee campus.  Subsequently, the murals were shown in old Mitchell Hall for four years, then rolled up for storage, never to be seen again. 

During the years he was not in school, Schellin completed several art projects for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and taught art in the East Orange, New Jersey public schools, at the old Milwaukee Country Day School, and at Madison (WI) West High School.

While teaching in New Jersey, Schellin studied painting with the late Hans Hoffmann.  Under Hoffmann’s influence, Schellin turned from regionalism and impressionism to abstract-expressionism.  At the same time he began experimenting with clay too, extending contemporary ideas about line and form into 3 dimensions.  Being a painter resulted in his being especially interested in the surfaces of his ceramics.

Schellin taught at the Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1937-38, and again from 1945 until his retirement in 1975.  By then the school had been renamed the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  For 20 of those 30 years, Schellin served as head of the ceramics area.  Schellin was also a very skilled printmaker and created countless lithographs, wood-cuts, and wood-engravings.  He played an instrumental role in bringing printmaking to the college curriculum.

Schellin was recognized both for his expressive, innovative ceramics and his abstract paintings.  During his career, he worked in oil, egg tempera, acrylic and encaustic.  In addition to teaching, he was a productive artist his whole life.  His Retrospective Exhibition at the time of his retirement included over 200 paintings, drawings, prints, and ceramics covering four decades of his life from the 30’s to the 70’s.  Many of those later works showed the influences of travel throughout the American west.

During the decade following retirement, when travel had become limited, Schellin returned to his earlier interest in recording the world around him, chronicling the changes in the Milwaukee environment, drawing and painting street scenes.

Schellin died of a heart attack in 1985; he was 74.