Eduard Buk Ulreich Biography

Mr. Ulreich does not identify himself with any particular school. He says that his only claim to modernism is that he is doing it now – Art World magazine, 1925

Despite his resistance to labels, Ulreich’s work situates him firmly within the modernist movement, though he rejected such categorization. Trained in the traditions of representational art, he sought instead to express “spiritual truth and beauty” beyond surface appearances. His career traced a path across continents, and artistic movements, leaving behind a body of work that reflects both independence of vision and the restless energy of the era.

Ulreich was born in 1889 in Koszeg, Hungary, the youngest of five children in a German-speaking family. That same year, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Kansas City. At the time, the city was a rapidly growing frontier hub, home to one of the country’s largest stockyards and steeped in cowboy culture and pioneer memory. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which played regularly in the city, made a vivid impression on the young Ulreich, as did the works of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell who were presented regularly in the pages of Collier’s Weekly magazine. Showing early promise as an artist, he enrolled in Kansas City’s Fine Arts Institute after high school. In 1911, he won the prestigious William L. Elkins Prize, which enabled him to study tuition-free at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia.

While his training at PAFA grounded him in traditional methods, powerful formative experiences came during summers away from the academy. In 1911 he worked on ranches in Montana and Wyoming and lived among the Sioux in South Dakota; in 1912 he rode horseback from Kansas City to El Paso, TX, taking jobs as a ranch hand along the way. These adventures earned him the nickname “Buk” from fellow students, captivated by his tales of the American West. These memories would remain a lifelong source of inspiration in his art. Ulreich was also influenced by travels to Europe. Twice awarded PAFA’s William Emlen Cresson Traveling Scholarship, he toured Europe in 1913, where he encountered radical modernist movements in Paris, where Cubism, Fauvism and Surrrealism were emerging and in Munich where the Blue Rider Group and other German Expressionists were prominent. In 1914, he again traveled to Europe, though his journey was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. These transatlantic experiences broadened his perspective and placed him at the intersection of European Modernist movements and American themes.

Ulreich completed his studies in 1915 and spent the following few years painting, exhibiting, and supporting himself through commercial projects in Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. Drafted briefly into the Army in 1918, he served two months before the war ended, having never left Long Island. In 1920 he temporarily settled in Chicago, where he found steady commercial work with advertising agencies. There, in 1921, he met and married fellow artist Nora Woodson, known professionally as Nura. Talented in her own right, Nura proved to be a trusted partner in guiding Ulreich’s career.

In 1923, Ulreich and Nura relocated to New York City, then emerging as the center of the art world. The 1920s proved to be the most successful decade of Ulreich’s career. His works were exhibited at the prominent Anderson and New Dudensing Galleries in New York and the renowned Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. He exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Salon d’Automne in Paris, and the Vienna Secession. Although the effects of the stock market crash in 1929 slowed his career momentum, Ulreich capped the decade of success with a landmark commission: a mural for Radio City Music Hall in 1932, joining artists such as Ezra Winter, Stuart Davis, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The work, titled Wild West remains in place as a testament to his modernist vision of the American West.

Like many artists during the Depression, Ulreich turned to New Deal programs for support. Throughout the 1930s he painted murals across the country and internationally, including New York, North Carolina, Missouri, Florida, North Dakota and at the the Paris International Exposition in 1937. These large-scale works, depicted regional history and indigenous cultures, and reflected Ulreich’s modernist sensibility while engaging with local identity

Ulreich’s career in the 1940s was again impacted by events beyond his control as World War II consumed the nation’s attention and shifting tastes in the art world emerged. He mounted exhibitions but increasingly relied on teaching art classes in his midtown Manhattan studio. His marriage to Nura ended in separation in 1948, and after her death in 1950, Ulreich married Virginia (Geni) McFarland, a former art student. As abstract expressionism and other postwar movements took center stage in New York, Ulreich felt increasingly sidelined. In 1954, seeking renewal, he and Geni relocated to San Francisco. There he continued to paint and exhibit, though with only modest success. In his final years, despite financial strain, poor health, and self-doubt, Ulreich remained hopeful, writing to family of “better days ahead when I become a famous artist.” Ulreich died in San Francisco July 17, 1966.

Ulreich’s early work (1920s) exhibited a strong Art Deco influence featuring canvases with streamlines forms, bold color and a penchant for decoration. As his work evolved (1930s-1940s) he developed a style of painting that borrowed from Cubism, Fauvism and the Surrealists, rejecting traditional perspective, flattening images and often employing bold color. Later in his career Ulreich embraced a style that borrowed heavily from Abstract Expressionism, covering large canvases entirely with image, texture and color.

Ulreich’s oeuvre spans commercial art, exploration of the female form, the American West, equestrian motifs and total abstraction–demonstrating a lifelong fascination with form, movement and reduction.

Ulreich’s horses reveal his most graphic, most repeated and most formally disciplined works, first appearing in the late 1920s and reappearing through the late 1950s. His horses were most directly influenced by the work of Franz Marc and Giorgio de Chirico, both of whom–similar to Ulreich–imbue the horse with deep spiritual meaning serving as a metaphor for freedom, innocence and the purity of nature.

A more comprehensive retrospective on Ulreich’s career and influences is accessible below.