Contemporary American painter. Born in Chicago, he studied first at the Art Institute and later at various other institutions in the United States and France. During World War I he did surgical drawings for a medical unit. In the early 1930’s his large, painstakingly meticulous renderings of reality with their moral intentions and morbid overtones achieved great notoriety. He paints the ordinary with a microscopic attention to detail, enshrouding it, however, with an aura of decay and horror. Although not an orthodox Surrealist, his works resemble the productions of that school not only in their precision of rendering but in their sense of eerie unreality.