Sawin was born in New York City in 1922. He attended Brown University and earned a B.A. from Columbia University, where he studied with the great art historian Meyer Schapiro. Perceiving Sawin’s passion and unique sensibility, Schapiro became a lifelong friend and mentor. Still'Life'1940's - David SawinWith Schapiro’s encouragement, Sawin studied under the G.I. Bill at the Atelier Fernand Leger in Paris. He continued graduate work at the State University of Iowa and later returned to Columbia, to study further with Schapiro and eventually assume a teaching position. (Sawin’s correspondence with Schapiro is archived at Columbia University.) In 1959, Sawin joined the faculty at Brooklyn College, where he taught until 1984. The art department included many notable artists and scholars; among them were Philip Pearlstein, Walter Rosenblum, Lois Dodd, Jack Flam, Ad Reinhart, Gabriel Laderman, and Lennart Anderson. Sawin’s lectures were often a first encounter with fine arts for many City College students; his empathy, sensitivity and deeply felt interpretations inspired many. Sawin’s work gained early recognition. He was included in the 1955 Annual of the Whitney Museum of American Art and in “Artists of the New York School – Second Generation” at the Jewish Museum in 1958, alongside such notable contemporaries as Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert DeNiro Sr., Grace Hartigan, Wolf Kahn, and Elaine de Kooning. He was represented by the Zabriskie Gallery in the 1950’s and 60’s. His work is also part of the now famous Dorothy and Herbert Vogel collection, which was the subject of a show at the National Gallery of Art in 2001. As large-scale abstract work began to dominate the art world of the 60’s, followed by the shift to pop art and minimalism in the 70’s, figurative expressionist painters were pushed toward the margins of the New York scene. Yet contemporary masters such as Sawin, along with Leland Bell, Robert DeNiro Sr., Louisa Mathiasdottir, Al Kresch, Nell Blaine, Wolf Kahn, and others, continued to follow their own idealist paths. In Sawin’s case, his work became more deeply intuitive: it was action painting in that he had an intensely interactive painting practice. As Arthur Danto wrote, there “were theories abroad when Sawin began as an artist that paintings were just paint, or that they were the tangible expression of the act of painting them. These theories penetrated everything being done in New York at that time, as they penetrated his work then and ever since. But whether because he remained within the boundaries of representation…or for reasons that will forever escape our comprehension, his work transcended the formulae that defined New York painting of that era much, I suppose, as the personality of some marvelous individual transcends his or her own physiological reality.” Sawin spent his last years in Rhode Island. During this time, he produced a number of small landscape-inspired paintings that came to characterize the final, highly productive phase of his career. He had successful shows at the Virginia Lynch Gallery in Tiverton and, in 1986, a comprehensive retrospective at the Newport Museum of Art.