
Simka Simkhovitch WPA Artist Lithograph Island Beach 1933 American Modernist
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Simka SimkhovitchSimka Simkhovitch WPA Artist Lithograph Island Beach 1933 American Modernist1933
1933
$850List Price
About the Item
- Creator:Simka Simkhovitch (1893 - 1949, Russian, American)
- Creation Year:1933
- Dimensions:Height: 11.2 in (28.45 cm)Width: 15.6 in (39.63 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:good. minor wear. please see photos.
- Gallery Location:Surfside, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU3826488342
Simka Simkhovitch
Simka Simkhovitch was born near the city of Kiev, Russia. When he was 7, he spent a year in bed with a severe case of measles. To amuse himself he used to sketch an old mill outside his window, and thus decided to become an artist. He studied at an art school in Odessa and was recommended to attend the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg (a singular honor in Russia at the time) before the war and revolution. Swept up into the army before he could attend, his work was hung in the Museum of Revolution in Leningrad. He resumed his studies in 1914 and graduated four years later. He was sent to the United States in 1924 to do illustrations for Soviet textbooks. He quickly applied for and gained U.S. citizenship. Simkhovitch integrated with the art world immediately and galleries such as Midtown Galleries and Marie Sterner took him on as part of their stable of artists. He also was employed by the WPA and executed major mural commissions throughout the country. One of his largest commissions was the Mississippi Court House. Life magazine profiled him twice with full-length features on his life here in this country as an artist. When he died at an early age, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York offered to do a retrospective and the widow denied the possibility and simply put his works away in storage. Considered a master draftsman and an adherent of certain classicism, Simkhovitch’s compositions are often built up in a complicated but well-managed counterpoint. But at heart, he is a romanticist preferring the dreamy colors of a Russian fairy tale.
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By Simka Simkhovitch
Located in Surfside, FL
Simka Simkhovitch (Russian/American 1893 - 1949) signed lithograph. Pencil signed and dated "S. Simkhovitch 1933" lower center. Title "Island Beach,"...
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George Grosz (July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his Satire and Caricature drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar Republic before he emigrated to the United States in 1933. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where his teachers were Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, and Oskar Schindler. He subsequently studied at the Berlin College of Arts and Crafts under Emil Orlik. Grosz left the Communist Party KPD in 1922 after having spent five months in Russia and meeting Lenin and Trotsky, because of his antagonism to any form of dictatorial authority. Along with Otto Dix, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Bitterly anti Nazi, Grosz left Germany shortly before Hitler came to power. In June 1932, he accepted an invitation to teach the summer semester at the Art Students League of New York. In October 1932, Grosz returned to Germany, but on January 12, 1933 he and his family emigrated to America.
In 1946 he published his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. In the 1950s he opened a private art school at his home and also worked as Artist in Residence at the Des Moines Art Center. Grosz was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician in 1950. In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Grosz worked in a style influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration, graffiti, and children's drawings.The City (1916–17) was the first of his many paintings of the modern urban scene. Other examples include the apocalyptic Explosion (1917), Metropolis (1917), and The Funeral, a 1918 painting depicting a mad funeral procession.
In his drawings, usually in pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, Grosz did much to create the image most have of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great subjects His draftsmanship was excellent although the works for which he is best known adopt a deliberately crude form of caricature. His oeuvre includes a few absurdist works, and also includes a number of erotic artworks. ("Ecce Homo" which saw him accused of pornography)
My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon. ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket ... I drew a skeleton...
Category
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Materials
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