Efraim Racker Art Albums

About this collection

This collection contains digital surrogates of art albums created and assembled by scientist and artist Efraim Racker over the course of his life. Racker used a variety of media in his work, including oil, charcoal, ink, acrylics, watercolors, magic markers, pencil and computer dot matrix prints. Some of the physical albums are now quite fragile. Most of these album covers are inexpensive plastic binders, scrapbooks and photo albums bound with nuts and bolts, aluminum rings, string and small leather belts. Racker mounted his artwork in the albums on construction paper, card stock, graph paper, photo album sticky pages, and Cornell stationary.

Ithaca photographer Jon Reis digitally photographed the albums as raw files in 2012. The digitized photographs of the albums are part of the Efraim Racker Collection of the library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Historical context

Efraim Racker was born in 1913 in Neu Sandez, Poland and started painting in Vienna when an aunt gave him an oil painting set in 1925 for his twelfth birthday. He was accepted to the Austrian Academy of Art in 1932 but attended briefly. After receiving an M.D. in 1938 from the University of Vienna, he escaped the Nazi occupation and went to England where he began working on energy metabolism. In 1941 he emigrated to the U.S. and soon continued studies of energy metabolism at NYU School of Medicine where he made the seminal discovery of a thioester high-energy intermediate, a bond previously unknown in biology.

In 1966, he moved to Ithaca, New York in 1966 as the Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry and Chair of the Section of Biochemistry at Cornell University in the newly created Division of Biological Sciences. Racker received many honors for his research, including election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1966 and the New York Academy of Sciences in 1979. He received the National Medal of Science in 1976, among numerous other awards, and held honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester. He served on 14 advisory and editorial boards and authored nearly 500 professional papers, six books, and numerous essays. He painted and drew prolifically throughout his life.

Using the collection

For more information about the collection, please contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward

Evan Earle, Peter J. Thaler University Archivist

Metadata creation

Cornell University Library

Credits

This collection overview was adapted from a website featuring Efraim Racker's work and was last reviewed in 2025.

Collection sources

• Efraim Racker papers
• Private collection, family of Efraim Racker