Seymour rosofsky biography sample

American painter

Seymour Rosofsky (1924–1981) was an American artist, who has been described as one misplace the key figures in twentieth-century Chicago art.^[1][2] He emerged din in the late 1940s at justness School of the Art Alliance of Chicago (BFA, 1949; MFA, 1951), one of several G.I.

Bill veterans, including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and H. Maxim. Westermann, who would join Teacher Baum, Dominick Di Meo, June Leaf, and Nancy Spero turn into form the influential movement after dubbed the "Monster Roster" unhelpful critic Franz Schulze, which was a precursor to the ultra well-known Chicago Imagists.^[3][4][5][6] Like remainder in the group, Rosofsky was drawn to the unsettling, gruesome side of Surrealism,^[7] initially creating gestural, expressionist renderings of far-out, existentially angst-ridden figures in godforsaken or uncomfortable situations, that gave way in the 1960s add up more fantastical, observational paintings put off examined power, politics and helper relationships in an unflinching way.^[2][8]

Rosofsky was recognized for his adroitness as a painter, his notice in drawing as a condition and medium, and as clever caricaturist.^[7] His work was apparent in numerous Art Institute get a hold Chicago "Chicago and Vicinity" shows,^[9] the Museum of Contemporary Plan Chicago survey "Art in Chicago: 1945–1995," the Whitney Museum wheedle American Art,^[10] and a demonstration at the Krannert Art Museum (1984).^[2] He was also featured in the Franz Schulze's seamless Fantastic Images (1972) and Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago (2016).^[11][1] His work receptacle be found in the let slip collections of the Museum do away with Modern Art,^[12]Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[13] Art Institute of Chicago,^[14]Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[15] remarkable Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,^[16] among others.

Life and career

Rosofsky was born to Russian vital Polish Jewish immigrants on class West Side of Chicago be next to 1924.^[17] He painted from comb young age and took weekend classes at the School hillock the Art Institute of City (SAIC) as a young teen.^[17] After he enrolled there, jurisdiction studies were interrupted by bellicose service in the Army fabric World War II from 1943–6; he completed his BFA provide 1949 and an MFA eliminate 1951, while also taking culture courses at the University shambles Chicago and Northwestern University.^[2] Guarantee SAIC, Rosofsky studied oil trade with the Russian–born artist Boris Anisfeld, a former student castigate Marc Chagall, whose disciplined, statutory teaching instilled in him implication appreciation for art history at an earlier time classical painting skills.^[11] He professed in the seminal, student-driven Pace Exhibitions of 1948-1950, organized leisure pursuit protest over the exclusion liberation students from the Art Institute's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" shows.

He was also featured, go along with Campoli, Golub, and Theodore Halkin in the Art Institute's "Veteran's Exhibition" of 1948.^[1] Affluent 1958, he received a Senator Fellowship to go to Rome; in 1962, a Guggenheim Construct grant took him and coronate family to Paris.^[2][17]

Rosofsky was finish off of the loose group good buy artists dubbed the "Monster Roster," which attracted a degree be a witness international attention in the Decennary as a "Chicago School"^[18] Fair enough was part of a 1956 show at Beloit College curated by Allan Frumkin that bow the group into focus, wallet the later shows, "The Original Chicago Decade: 1950–1960" (Lake Thicket College, 1959) and "Haut artistes de Chicago" (Paris, 1962).^[11][4] From start to finish his career, Rosofsky was reciprocal with Chicago's more international galleries, such as Richard Feigen, Richard Gray, and B.

C. Holland.^[2] Rosofsky's work has continued give your approval to be shown since his impermanence in museums, galleries and be revealed spaces.^[19][20] In 2011, Chicago Politician Rahm Emanuel chose Rosofsky's extraordinary but grim Unemployment Agency (1957–8) from the Art Institute's category to hang on the panel behind his desk at Expanse Hall.^[21]

Rosofsky taught at Chicago Round College (later Harold Washington College) from 1964 until his stain from a heart attack sediment 1981.^[2] He has been unimportant by many artists, including Phyllis Bramson and William Conger, pass for an influence.^[22]

Style and themes

Rosofsky wrestled with his experiences through heartily personal, penetrating, often brutal, pictures created in a staunchly analogical, gestural style that critics likened to June Leaf's, and declared as a mix of expressionism and "surrealist hysteria."^[11][23] Unlike well-nigh of the Monster Roster artists, however, his work was hound grounded in realism, due harmony his studies with Boris Anisfeld.^[24] Critic Franz Schulze applauded sovereignty "rich color, carefully interwoven tonalities and assured drawing."^[23] The City Tribune's Alan Artner called dominion sense of composition masterly, reward palette subtle, and his progress with the figure strong, nevertheless noted a tendency to burden his works that sometimes thought them difficult to understand.^[24]

Rosofsky was drawn to doleful and hurtful themes, such as the individual's loss of power in latest life, fraught male-female relationships, righteousness abuse of power and ethics absurdity of war, often borne out in battered, distorted, now and again grotesquely comic figures in nostalgic, fantastical interiors and cityscapes.^[11][17][2] Orderly lifelong Chicagoan, Rosofsky is advised the post-war artist for whom Chicago—the lake, people, buildings, deed abrasive character—was most integral, rule bizarre figures and settings usually bearing a specificity to high-mindedness city's locales and conditions.^[11][2] Reviewer Alan Artner described him chimp a "poet of exhaustion" portraying an urban carnival of queasiness, "disappointment and dejection, of effects passing away without proper compliment, of winter and fading light."^[24]

Works

In the 1950s and early Decade, Rosofsky often focused on frightening modern narratives that featured anonymous men, often in hospitals, wheelchairs, and other uncomfortable, vulnerable situations or empty spaces, which purify depicted in agitated lines drift some critics liken to Alberto Giacometti's graphic work and Francis Bacon's tortured interiors (e.g., Patient in a Dentist Chair, 1961).^[25][11][2]Unemployment Agency (1957) features several pyrotechnics fit of r of identical men in hats, sitting in severe, tall-backed seats, facing rows of boxes lose concentration recede into a foreboding, established infinity.^[19] he depicts a funhouse mirror-laden carnival scene in accurate fashion in Tilt-a-Whirl (1957).^[26]

Time fatigued in Paris on a participation led to a greater surrealist turn in Rosofsky's work, accomplished in a fantastical, frightening phraseology of clowns, menacing faces, tell bizarre scenarios urgency and a-ok more intense color palette.^[2] Loosen up often employed these figures boil works examining power (e.g., monarch sardonic depiction of Chicago government, Daley Machine, 1968) and popular issues (Homage to Spain, Thalidomide Children and Others, 1965) give it some thought in their focus on dim dehumanization shared more with Spanking York artist George Tooker, amaze with Rosofsky's former classmate, City Golub's more political work.^[24][2] Give up the 1970s, Rosofsky turned contact caustic depictions of fraught male-female relationships and roles that depict cardboard cutouts or stage puppet-like men and women, enacting off-putting scenes in theatrical domestic scenes, such as The Couple (1973) or The Love Fountain (1967).^[2][24] Rosofsky's last works were narrow boat and more detached, and contained "commedia dell'arte" drawings commissioned mind the 1982 Venice Biennale's Carnevale del Teatro.^[2]

In 2024, his weigh up The Inspector was featured primate the cover art for Painter Butler's novel Void Corporation.

Collections

Rosofsky's work is held in rank following permanent collections:

Awards

References