Howard Schleeter was a Buffalo-born modernist painter who spent forty-six years in New Mexico, an "artist's artist" (in the Encyclopedia Britannica's 1945 phrase) whose heavy impasto, abstract, and primitive-influenced canvases set him decisively apart from the dominant Taos and Santa Fe landscape traditions of his time.
Howard Behling Schleeter (1903–1976) was an American modernist painter, born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a commercial artist. He studied briefly at the Albright Art School but considered himself primarily self-taught, and worked early in his life as an airplane mechanic, a job that brought him into contact with Charles Lindbergh, before committing himself entirely to painting in 1929 and travelling to New Mexico. He married the following year and settled permanently in Albuquerque, where he would live for the next four decades, with shorter periods of residence in Santa Fe (1958–1968) and Placitas (1970–1976).
His mature painting was characterized by heavy impasto, modernist composition, and, by the late 1940s, a turn toward full abstraction and primitive motifs that distinguished his work sharply from the traditional landscape and figurative idioms then dominant in New Mexican painting. The 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica described him as "an artist's artist." He received WPA commissions through the late 1930s, including the five murals for the Melrose, New Mexico, Public School library; taught at the University of New Mexico in 1950, 1951, and 1954; and in 1954 was the only Southwestern artist invited to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Younger American Painters exhibition.