George Josimovich
'Commuters' — Early 20th-Century Modernism
1922-23

Name: 'Commuters' — Early 20th-Century Modernism
Brand: George Josimovich
Price: 1800 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

George Josimovich, 'Commuters', linocut, 1922-23, edition 20. Signed, dated '22, titled, and annotated '9/20' in pencil. Initialed in the block 'G.J. ‘23', lower right. A fine, richly-inked impression, on cream wove paper; the full sheet with margins (2 1/2 to 7 1/4 inches), in good condition. Image size 8 7/8 x 6 7/8 inches; sheet size 19 1/4 x 12 inches. Matted to museum standards, unframed. “Life is in a constant state of flux-never-ceasing motion. Everything breathes, moves, vibrates. And it is my ardent belief that the same should be true in a work of art. It should be alive, dynamically alive. Every part of it should live and every part of it should contribute life to the creation as a whole. ...anyone who is sensitive and creative enough to deserve to be called an artist will consciously or unconsciously react to...those phases of life with which his particular nature and personality have a special kinship. And all this cannot help but leave an impress upon his work which is and must be, if it is sincere, an objective manifestation of his inner self.” —George Josimovich, Illinois Historical Art Project ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Mitrovica, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia), George Josimovich (1894 - 1986) immigrated to the United States with his parents and three younger brothers in 1908. The family settled in Fort Laramie and Cheyenne, Wyoming, along the Union Pacific Railroad, where his father worked as a tailor. In 1914, motivated by a newspaper advertisement for the Lockwood Art School in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Josimovich set out for the Midwest to pursue a career in art. From 1914–19 he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) under Karl Buehr and Randall Davey, and alongside fellow students William Schwartz, Emil Armin, and Archibald J. Motley Jr. During his final year at SAIC, Josimovich enrolled in a life class with visiting professor George Bellows, whose teachings about avant-garde art, geometric composition, color theory, and individualism in art exerted a profound influence. An exhibition of applied arts by German artist Hermann Sachs at the Art Institute of Chicago during the winter of 1920–21 also made a strong impression on the young artist. Josimovich studied under Sachs at Chicago’s Hull House and, along with other former SAIC students, followed Sachs to the Dayton Art Museum in Ohio to establish an expressionist craft program. Josimovich returned to Chicago in 1922, where he joined the Jackson Park art colony and spent the next four years honing his craft and developing theories on composition and form. His works from this period evince a lively experimentation with modernist principles and techniques in oil and watercolor paintings, prints, and drawings. Familiar genres of figure study, still life, and landscape are distilled into abstract arrangements of fragmented forms in radically flattened pictorial space, often within tightly ordered geometric compositions. Throughout the 1920s Josimovich established himself as a leading contemporary artist in the city, exhibiting with the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, The Ten, and the Chicago Society of Artists, where he later served as president. Critics lauded him as quintessentially modern, praising his “rigid intellectualism” and his focus on color, form, and movement. Josimovich’s year in Paris in 1926–27, where he encountered other practitioners of abstraction and the theory of purism, further stimulated his modernist approach to art. His French sojourn culminated in a 1927 solo exhibition at the Galerie d’art contemporain in Paris, which garnered much coverage in the press. In the 1930s, Josimovich dramatically transformed his art and became an expressionist in the vein of French painter Chaim Soutine. Soutine, who had emigrated to Paris in 1913 from Belarus, rose to international prominence through a major show at the gallery of Paul Guillaume in 1923 and subsequent purchases of his work by American collector Albert Barnes. Josimovich’s portraits, still lifes, and landscapes from this period bear some of the hallmarks of Soutine’s work in their exaggerated figures, quivering masses of color, and dynamic brushstrokes, and as a result, sparked strongly divided commentary among Chicago critics. In the early 1930s, Josimovich was one of the organizers of the Fifty-seventh Street Art Colony, a group of artists with modernist sympathies, and worked briefly for the artists’ relief program of the Works Progress Administration. He continued to show his work through the 1950s in numerous group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, with the No-Jury Society of Artists and the Chicago Society of Artists, and in a solo exhibition at Knoedler’s Chicago gallery in 1932. —edited from an essay by Patricia Smith Scanlan for ‘Modernism in the New City, Chicago Artists, 1920-1950’

Creator:

George Josimovich (1894 - 1986)

Creation Year:

1922-23

Dimensions:

Height: 8.88 in (22.56 cm)Width: 6.88 in (17.48 cm)

Medium:

Linocut

Movement & Style:

American Modern

Period:

1920-1929