Here we have a touching scene entitled Holy Night and Signed by American artist Hyman Warsager.  This is a silkscreen serigraph which the artist was famous for.  

Hyman Warsager was born June 23, 1909 and raised in New York City.  He studied at the Pratt Institute of Art, the Grand Central School of Art, and the American Artists School.  He was active in the New York City WPA graphic arts division from 1935-1939.  His work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance, the Philadelphia Print Club, the San Francisco Art Association (prize winner in 1938), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1940-42), and the Chicago Art Institute. He was a regular contributor to the New Masses magazine.  October 2, 1941 A permanent exhibition demonstrating the producing of prints made by hand processes opens in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Brooklyn Museum on Thursday, October 2, arranged by the Museum’s Department of Prints. The processes represented are: wood and steel engraving, woodcuts and wood blocks, etching methods, lithography and silk screen.  To explain the silk screen process a set of progressive proofs of Hyman Warsager’s “Choir Boy” is exhibited, as well as a printing frame and a squeegee, the latter the tool that pushes the color through the silk.  The painting is 8 5/8" x 6 1/2" viewable with a deteriorating matte set in a bamboo frame.  

Warsager was a member of the John Reed Club.  The club was named after the journalist who founded the American Communist Party in 1929.  The club had 30 branches in major cities across the country, and sponsored art exhibitions, art classes, and political discussions. 

January 9, 1934 a drawing by Warsager titled, The Law, was published in the New Masses "The bound figure of a Negro man hangs from a tree whose roots grow through a fantastic edifice in the middle ground labeled 'US COURTS'.  The shadow of the figure falls ominously across the building and in the center of the pediment is a swastika.  The primary meaning is that the American legal and judicial systems are fascist, mere tools of the capitalists and their bourgeois allies to control and destroy the working class and to deny civil rights to Negroes.  The secondary meaning is that the American racism is the same as Nazism.  Warsager, like several of the John Reed Club members, was Jewish."   Warsager was also one of the 45 artists whose work was included in an exhibition at the ACA Gallery in Greenwich Village in 1935 titled, The Struggle for Negro Rights. This exhibition was sponsored by several groups, including the John Reed Club and the Artists Union.

Warsager was a strong advocate for print making, both lithographs and silk screen prints.  In his 1936 essay "Graphic Techniques in Progress" Warsager described silk screen as "'the most startling contribution to color prints' because of the economy, ease and diverse possibilities of the process."

Part of the mission of the Graphic Art Division of the WPA was to make art available to the general public.  "An experimental silk screen unit was set up  in the New York Garphic Division in November 1938 at the instigation of the Artists' Union and the Public Use of Art Committee.  It was directed by Anthony Velonis."  Warsager was one of the 6 artists to establish this unit.  

Warsager died in New York City in 1974.  His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the San Francisco Art Academy, and Wesleyan University.



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