An early 1920 gouache on paper or board painting by Hungarian Jewish American artist Alexander (A.) Raymond Katz measuring approximately 12 7/8 x 10 3/4 visible inches in its original frame with original early glass (possibly glass earlier than 1920) measuring approximately 20 1/4 x 17 1/4 inches. Appears to be symbolizing the struggles of the African Americans. Katz entered the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1920s. Below contains his biography and an overview of Modernism in the Visual Arts. Thanks for looking.
Alexander (A.) Raymond Katz
b. Kassa, Hungary, 1895–d. New York, NY, 1974
A. Raymond Katz was born in 1895 in Kassa, a military town
in northern Hungary. His father was a tailor who made military uniforms. After
the young artist started selling his work in Kassa, his father permitted him to
study art in New York. He came to the United States in 1909 at age 14 (his
given first name, Sandor, was anglicized to Alexander) and supported himself in
New York with a variety of odd jobs. Katz eventually found employment in a
lithography shop in Chicago producing war posters, earning enough money to
build a house and bring his family to the United States.
After the war, Katz traveled to the West Coast and Canada,
arriving back in Chicago rich in experience and in need of a paying occupation.
He took a job at the Barron Collier company designing car card advertisements,
but quit in 1922 to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He supported himself with jobs in the
burgeoning motion picture field, ultimately as the director of the art
department of the Balaban and Katz (no relation) theater empire, where he
oversaw the decoration of the movie palaces of the 1920s. In 1927, Katz and his
family (he married in 1924) traveled back to Kassa where he pursued his first
love, fine art. He reconnected with his Jewish heritage and brought back to
Chicago many images of Jewish life. Although he continued to do commercial work
throughout his career, he increasingly began to explore Jewish themes and was
the recipient of numerous commissions for synagogues all over the country,
creating stained glass windows, murals, reliefs, sculptures, and decorative
items for them. He set up a studio in his apartment building and opened an
office in the tower of the Auditorium Building that also housed the Little
Gallery, an important venue for progressive art in the city, which he operated
until 1933.
Katz also explored the aesthetic and philosophical
interpretations of Hebrew letters, as seen in the woodcut Moses and the Burning
Bush, which he submitted to the portfolio, A Gift to Birobidjan in 1937. Hebrew
letters are integrated into the image: the first initial of Moses’s name crowns
his head; the first letter of the name of God appears inside the flame; and his
staff is topped by a letter.
During the Depression, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright
urged Katz to become a muralist and in 1933, he was one of eleven artists
chosen to create murals for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago,
where his enormous secular work, O.K., was installed in pavilion three of the
General Exhibits Building along with a series of murals addressing Jewish
themes in the Hall of Religions. He won
the competition for best poster for the fair in 1934. In 1936, he was
commissioned to paint murals representing the Ten Commandments, for the Loop
Synagogue in Chicago, then thought to be the first murals in an Orthodox
synagogue.
In addition to his work for Balaban and Katz, he served as
director of the poster department at Paramount Studios (1926–31), and the
director of posters for the Chicago Civic Opera (1930–33), developing his
graphic talents as well as his fine arts skills. His large gouache on paper,
Untitled (Radio performer), reflects his background in theater, offering a
behind-the-scenes view of the radio business. It is an animated portrait of a
sound technician in front of a microphone, shooting a gun (presumably with
blanks) and surrounded by paraphernalia of the sound effects trade. Evidence of
the close relationship between his commercial work and his pursuits as a
painter are found in an illustration from The Chicagoan (July 1933), a
short-lived periodical that employed Katz frequently as a graphic artist. His
drawing shows a family in front of their radio from which emerges a fantastic
variety of entertainments in an overall pattern stylistically similar to that
of Untitled (Radio Performer).
Like many artists in the 1930s, Katz participated in the
government-supported arts projects. In 1936, Katz won the commission to paint
the mural, History of the Immigrant, for the post office in Madison, Illinois,
from the Treasury Department, the most prestigious of the projects. His style
and subject matter, like that of many of his contemporaries, reflected the
mandate to represent “the American Scene.”
His oil painting, Chicago Street Scene, 1936–42, is one of a
series of images of Chicago’s alleys that Katz produced during the Depression.
Highlighting the small-town camaraderie that was fast disappearing in 1930s
America, Katz also alludes to the poverty of the period in the peddlers making
their way on foot with wheelbarrows and horse-drawn carts. The color scheme,
brilliant and jarring in this representation of material austerity that extends
to the leafless trees, lends a bit of optimism to the dark times. The idea that
art could change the world was one that Katz subscribed to in images such as
this one.
Katz moved to New York in the 1950s, and died in 1974.
Source:chicagomoderndotorg
Susan Weininger and
Lisa Meyerowitz
References
Bulliet, C. J. “Artists of Chicago Past and Present: No. 14:
A. Raymond Katz.” Chicago Daily News, May 25, 1935.
Harris, Neil. The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz
Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Oakton Community College. A Gift to Biro-Bidjan: Chicago,
1937: From Despair to New Hope. Exhibition website,
www.oakton.edu/museum/Katz.html.
Weaver, William R. “Sandor to You.” The Chicagoan (June
1934), 29, 57–58.
Weininger, Susan. “A. Raymond Katz.” In Chicago Modern,
1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy, p. 126. Chicago:
Terra Foundation of American Art, 2004.
Yochim, Louise Dunn. Role and Impact: The Chicago Society of
Artists, p. 248. Chicago: Chicago Society of Artists, 1979.
American modernism, much like the modernism movement in general, is a trend of philosophical thought arising from the widespread changes in culture and society in the age of modernity. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with a core period between World War I and World War II. Like its European counterpart, American modernism stemmed from a rejection of Enlightenment thinking, seeking to better represent reality in a new, more industrialized world.
Modernism in Visual ArtsThere is no single date for the
beginning of the modern era in America, as dozens of painters were active at
the beginning of the 20th century. It was the time when the first cubist
landscapes, still-life and portraits appeared; bright colors entered the
palettes of painters, and the first non-objective paintings were displayed in
the galleries.
The modernist movement during the formative years was also
becoming popular in New York City by 1913 at the popular Manhattan studio gallery
of Wilhelmina Weber Furlong (1878–1962) and through the work of the Whitney
Studio Cub in 1918. According to
Davidson, the beginning of American modernist painting can be dated to the
1910s. The early part of the period lasted 25 years and ended around 1935, when
modern art was referred to as, what Greenberg called the avant-garde.
The 1913 Armory Show in New York City displayed the
contemporary work of European artists, as well as Americans. The Impressionist,
Fauvist and Cubist paintings startled many American viewers who were accustomed
to more conventional art. However, inspired by what they saw, many American
artists were influenced by the radical and new ideas.
The early 20th century was marked by the exploration of
different techniques and ways of artistic expressiveness. Many American artists
like Wilhelmina Weber, Man Ray, Patrick Henry Bruce, Gerald Murphy and others
went to Europe, notably Paris, to make art. The formation of various artistic
assemblies led to the multiplicity of meaning in the visual arts. The Ashcan
School gathered around realism (Robert Henri or George Luks); the Stieglitz
circle glorified abstract visions of New York City (Max Weber, Abraham
Walkowitz); color painters evolved in direction of the colorful, abstract "synchromies"
(Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell), whereas precisionism visualized
the industrialized landscape of America in the form of sharp and dynamic
geometrization (Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, Morton Livingston Schamberg and
Charles Demuth). Eventually artists like Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley,
Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Beecher Carles,
Alfred Henry Maurer, Andrew Dasburg, James Daugherty, John Covert, Henrietta
Shore, William Zorach, Marguerite Thompson (Zorach), Manierre Dawson, Arnold
Friedman and Oscar Bluemner ushered in the era of Modernism to the New York
School.
The shift of focus and multiplicity of subjects in the visual
arts is also a hallmark of American modernist art. Thus, for example, the group
The Eight brought the focus on the modern city, and placed emphasis on the
diversity of different classes of citizens. Two of the most significant
representatives of The Eight, Robert Henri and John Sloan made paintings about
social diversity, often taking as a main subject the slum dwellers of
industrialized cities. The late 1920s and the 1930s belonged (among many
others) to two movements in American painting, Regionalism and Social Realism.
The regionalists focused on the colorfulness of the American landscape and the
complexities of country life, whereas the social realists went into the
subjects of the Great Depression, poverty, and social injustice. The social
realists protested against the government and the establishment that appeared
hypocritical, biased, and indifferent to the matters of human inequalities.
Abstraction, landscape and music were popular modernist themes during the first
half of the 20th century. Artists like Charles Demuth who created his
masterpiece I Saw The Figure Five in Gold in 1928, Morton Schamberg (1881–1918)
and Charles Sheeler were closely related to the Precisionist movement as well.
Sheeler typically painted cityscapes and industrial architecture as exemplified
by his painting Amoskeag Canal 1948. Jazz and music were improvisationally
represented by Stuart Davis, as exemplified by Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors –
7th Avenue Style, from 1940.
Modernism bridged the gap between the art and a socially
diverse audience in the U.S. A growing number of museums and galleries aimed at
bringing modernity to the general public. Despite initial resistance to the
celebration of progress, technology, and urban life, the visual arts
contributed enormously to the self-consciousness and awareness of the American
people. New modernist painting shined a light on the emotional and psychic
states of the audience, which was fundamental to the formation of an American
identity.
Numerous directions of American "modernism" did
not result in one coherent style, but evoked the desire for experiments and
challenges. It proved that modern art goes beyond fixed principles.
Main schools and movements of American modernism:
·
the Stieglitz group
·
the Arensberg circle
·
color painters
·
Precisionism
·
the Independents
·
the Philadelphia school
·
New York independents
·
Chicago and westward
Georgia O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American Modernism
since the 1920s. She has received widespread recognition, for challenging the
boundaries of modern American artistic style. She is chiefly known for
paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes in which she
synthesized abstraction and representation. Ram's Head White Hollyhock and
Little Hills, from 1935 is a well known painting by O'Keeffe.
Arthur Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in
unconventional combinations to produce his abstractions and his abstract
landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove
abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of
his career.[24] Dove did a series of experimental collage works in the 1920s.
He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or
tempera over a wax emulsion.
African-American painter Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) is one of
the best-known and most influential African-American modernist painters. His
works contributed strongly to the development of an aesthetic movement that is
closely related to distinct features of African-American heritage and culture.
Douglas influenced African-American visual arts especially during the Harlem
Renaissance.
One of Douglas' most popular paintings is The Crucifixion.
It was published in James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones in 1927. The
crucifixion scene that is depicted in the painting shows several elements that
constitute Douglas' art: clear-cut delineation, change of shadows and light,
stylized human bodies and geometric figures as concentric circles in contrast
to linear forms. The painting's theme resembles not only the biblical scene but
can also be seen as an allusion to African-American religious tradition: the
oversized, dark Jesus is bearing his cross, his eyes directed to heaven from
which light is cast down onto his followers. Stylized Roman soldiers are
flanking the scene with their pointed spears. As a result, the observer is
reminded for instance of the African-American gospel tradition but also of a
history of suppression. Beauford Delaney, Charles Alston, Jacob Lawrence and
Romare Bearden were also important African-American Modernist painters that
inspired generations of artists that followed them. source:wikipedia and their referenced sources
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