John Hultberg papers, circa 1922-1997

John Hultberg (1922-2005) was a painter and writer who worked mainly in New York.

Hultberg was born in Berkeley, California and attended Fresno State College, graduating in 1943. During World War Two he was a Navy Lieutenant and after the war studied at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), founded by the G. I. Bill. In 1948, he created a portfolio of seventeen lithographs with James Budd Dixon, Walter Kuhlman, and Frank Lobdell. The Portfolio was titled Drawings and has been acknowledged as a landmark in Abstract Expressionist Printmaking. In 1952, Hultberg studied at the Art Students League of New York.

Hultberg's first wife was Hilary Blech, and in 1961 he met artist Lynne Mapp Drexler and the two married three years later though at the time of Lynne's death in 1999 they were estranged. Hultberg had one son, Carl R. Hultberg. He then met his partner and agent Elaine Wechsler, who he was with until his death.

Hultberg primarily worked with abstract expressionist paintings and made surrealist landscapes which he created with linear perspectives and angular shapes. His paintings were influenced by his time spent on Monhegan Island in Maine, and his career reached its peak while he lived in Portland. In 1955 he won the Corcoran Biennial first prize in Washington. By 1990 he was a full-time resident of New York and he taught at the Art Students League until the week of his death.

Hultberg died on April 15, 2005, at the age of eighty-three in New York, New York.