Boris Deutsch

A Soulful Modernist Portrait

1957

Boris Deutsch (1892-1978) was a 20th century modernist figurative painter and printmaker. He was born in Krasnagorka, Lithuania on June 4, 1892. Deutsch began drawing at age five and remained a self-taught artist, except for brief intervals at the Bloom Academy of Art in Riga, Latvia and the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Berlin. He moved to Seattle, WA in 1916 and then to Los Angeles in 2019. He began his career as a commercial art and set designer for movies. In the late 1930's he was recruited to paint murals for the New Deal, WPA, receiving numerous mural commissions to paint murals for the treasury department and several post office buildings. In 1941 he won the large competition to decorate the Terminal Annex Post Office in Los Angeles with eleven large murals. During the last decade of his life he experimented with monotypes and other printmaking techniques. Deutsch died in Los Angeles on Jan. 16, 1978. Boris Deutsch's art has been the focus of many exhibitions, including: The University of California, Los Angeles in 1926, The Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1930, Oakland Art Gallery in 1937, The University of Southern California (USC) in 1939, The Whitney Museum in New York in 1946 and a centennial exhibition by the Judah l. Magnes Museum in Berkeley California in 1992. In 1955, Marc Chagall called him the greatest Jewish artist of our time. Deutch's works are held by several institutions and museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Scribal Museum, the Judah L. Magnes Museum Berkeley, California, and the Pomona College Museum of Art.