Irwin Touster (1921-2017)

Irwin Touster was born March 3rd, 1921, in New York City to Ben and Bertha Touster. He grew up on 52nd Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, and in 1925 his brother Saul was born.

The Touster brothers attended public school in Brooklyn, and for many years went to Camp Equinunk, in Equinunk, PA. After his camper days, Irwin became a councilor-in-training, designing sets for Artie Levine (who later changed his name to Arthur Laurents, and authored the book for the play, Gypsy). Irwin always carried fond memories of his camp days, and would recall them often.

As a kid, Irwin always loved looking at cartoons and reading the Sunday comic strips. He began drawing cartoons in high school while living with his family in Brooklyn, and his cartoons usually took the form of a single panel with limited text. Just prior to entering the army he settled on his unique characteristic for his cartoon subjects, giving them extremely large and pointy noses. After the war, his cartoons were published in numerous publications including the New Yorker, and the Saturday Review of Literature.

Touster began his college career as a student at Penn State College, signing up to become an Engineering Science Manager. The government had recently started the Engineering Science Management Defense Training program, and he figured going into the ESMDT program would keep him out of the army. It didn't quite work out that way for him.

In 1941 Touster was drafted into the US Army. He served in North Africa and Italy and was involved in the invasion of Southern France. As he used to say “I also peeled a hell of a lot of potatoes.” While in uniform, Touster finally had an outlet for his cartoons. Two army publications for the soldiers, Yank and Stars and Stripes, began publishing his work regularly.

When the war ended he continued his education at Pratt Institute in NYC, and then transferred to New York University where he received his Batchlor of Science degree in Art Education. Touster began making ceramics in the late 1940's and would throw, glaze and fire the pottery himself. He later attended the University of New Hampshire, where he pursued a Master of Arts degree. While there he was greatly influenced by his ceramic teachers, Mary and Ed Scheier.

The poet Reed Whittemore was Touster’s captain in the army, and they became good friends. After the war, Whittemore asked Irwin to illustrate his book of poems, Heroes and Heroines, and it was published in 1946. Whittemore had founded the poetry magazine Furioso, and Touster briefly served as the magazine’s art editor.

In 1948 Irwin began his teaching career, teaching sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, and set design at a number of institutions, which included: The University of New Hampshire (1948-1949); The Brooklyn Museum Art School (where he also chaired the ceramic department 1951-1952); The University of New York, Buffalo (1967); and City College of New York (1970-1972).

On June 28, 1949, Irwin married Sondra Hellman. They moved to Brooklyn, and then into an apartment in Manhattan at 150 West 87th Street, before moving to a larger apartment with a partial view of the Hudson River at 317 West 89th Street. Touster also rented studio space that he outfitted with a kiln and pottery wheel.

After five years of marriage Irwin and Sondra began a family and had two sons. Joshua Max was born in 1954, and David Raphael in 1957.

Needing to provide for a family of four, Touster reluctantly joined his father's business, the Cinderella Hat Company, a children's hat producer located on West 36th Street in New York's garment district. The job at Cinderella would be the last 9 to 5 job that he ever held.

While at Cinderella he began working on his novel Why Me? said Leah which touched on his experiences at the hat company. The manuscript went unfinished until 2013, when he finished and self-published it.

In the early 1960's, Irwin and Sondra bought a beach house on Fire Island, NY. Sondra and the two kids lived full time on the Island during the summers, while Irwin joined them on weekends. Except for some sketching and making plaster sand sculptures with his kids, Touster created very little art during his time on Fire Island, but from 1961 to 1964 he became the art critic for the Fire Island News. In 1964 he also wrote art reviews for a local NYC paper, The Westside News.

In 1962 Sondra and Irwin separated and he moved back to the same West 87th Street apartment building where he and Sondra had previously lived. He turned the living and dining rooms into his painting and sculpting studio, and lived and worked in that 3rd floor apartment for the next 56 years. 

In 1964, to his father's chagrin, Irwin left the family business to become a full time artist.

In 1966 Irwin visited the studio of the sculptor Peter Grippe, who inspired him to begin manipulating molten wax to form into sculpture. The majority of his days in 1967 and 1968 were spent at the Modern Art Foundry on Steinway Street in Long Island City, transforming his wax creations first to plaster, and eventually to bronze. During those three years, he completed and cast more than 175 pieces, which included standing figures, faces, reliefs, and large outdoor sculptures.

The Fire Island house was sold in 1968, and two years later Touster purchased a piece of property in Mount Tremper, New York; eight miles down the road from the town of Woodstock.

The four acre piece of property had a house, a large yellow barn, a stream, and a swimming pond. He rented out the house, and turned the rustic barn into his living space and painting studio. For the next 46 years he would spend every summer living in the barn, before returning to NYC in the fall.

In 1970 Irwin married for a second time, to Cheryl Kilgren. The marriage broke up after less then a year.

From 1974 through 1976 Touster was the art critic for the Woodstock Times. An extremely harsh reviewer, he was always looking to stir up trouble, and his reviews created quite the uproar in town. The editor of the paper couldn't have been more pleased.

In 1974 Touster was hired as “acting Chairman” to develop a fine arts department at Parsons School of Design in NYC.  A year later while proofreading the upcoming school catalog, he crossed out the word “acting”,  thus becoming the full Chairman of the department. Some of the faculty members that he hired included: Elaine De Kooning, Stuart Shedletski, Roger Shepherd, Larry Rivers, and Jane Wilson.

In the early 1970's Touster collaborated with author Burt Hirshfield on the political thriller, The Masters Affair, and with Richard Curtis on The Perez Arson Mystery and The Runaway Bus Mystery, two books with a legal background aimed to acquaint young readers with how the law functions in both society and in their own lives, The Washington Post: Views from the Inside, co-authored with Carol Williams, was published in 1976.

In the mid 1970's Touster became disillusioned with the art world's fixation on nonfigurative art, and stopped regularly exhibiting his work. With the exception of an occasional exhibition in the 1980's and 1990's, his work was rarely seen by the viewing public.

When Irwin’s father died in 1979, he purchased the Millstream Motel, a Woodstock institution in the heart of town. Touster owned the motel for the next eight years, and after it was sold, Ronald Baatz, a poet who was the Millstream's weekend manager moved into the Mount Tremper house full time, and lived there for over 25 years. Ronald and Irwin became close friends, and In 2000 they collaborated on Mt Tremper Haiku, a book of poems and drawings created on the property that they shared.

It the mid-1980's Irwin met Kathy Hyams, and they began a romantic relationship that would last the rest of his life. Kathy and Irwin collaborated on Kazuko: My Sweet Childhood Till the Bomb Fell, a book about Kathy's childhood growing up in Japan.

In 1992, Touster retired as Chairman of the Fine Arts Department at Parsons School of Design, after developing and chairing the department beginning in 1974. At retirement the school held a retrospective exhibition of his paintings and drawings. He also continued to teach a number of classes at Parsons during the next decade.

In the 1990's Touster returned to pottery for the first time since the 1950's. This time he did not throw or fire the work himself. Rather, he patronized Color-Me-Mine, a paint your own pottery studio that was located in a storefront in Kingston, NY. Working alongside children’s’ birthday parties and weekend hobbyists, he glazed and decorated pre-thrown plates, which were then fired by the studio.

The paintings and drawings for his series After the Victorians were begun in 1998 and were completed in 2005. The work was inspired by the Victorian artists, especially William Hogarth and later, Thomas Rowlandson. As Touster writes in the introduction to his book of the same name:

“The Victorians were the real storytellers. This for me is what this book is about, not their paintings. I do not respond to the paintings of the time, but to the ideas of story and how to tell them.”

In 1999, Irwin began a series of small paintings inspired by an old album of family photographs that belonged to his mother. Each painting was constructed by combining selected sections of photos from the album, as well as other family photographs. Each painting in his 2004 book Painted Memories is paired with written memories and stories from his life.

At the age of eighty three, Woodstock living became too difficult to navigate, and in 2006 Irwin decided that he could no longer spend his summer's there.

After 46 years, barn living came to an end.

Because of physical limitations, painting also started to become difficult for Irwin. He decided to dedicate himself to writing full time. From 2004 through 2015 he wrote nine books of fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, biography, and catalogs of his work, and he never painted again.

Irwin continued to live by himself in his NYC apartment until the age of 94. With his son Joshua, he would often visit his Woodstock property; sleeping in the house, sitting at the pond, and often viewing the rain through the large open doors of the barn where he had summered for so many years.

In 2016, in failing health, Irwin moved in temporally with his girlfriend Kathy in New Jersey, then to his son Joshua's house, before entering an assisted living facility in Massachusetts.

Three and a half months after moving to Massachusetts, on January 13th, 2017, Irwin Touster passed away in Newton MA, at the age of 95.

The majority of his ashes were spread on his beloved Woodstock property.

On March 2, 1992 Irwin Touster was interviewed, by Martica Sawin, for the Parson School of Design Centenary Oral History Project. In the interview Touster discusses his tenure as Chair of Fine Arts (BFA) at Parsons School of Design, which began in 1974.

[Click here for interview]