Seymour rosofsky biography sample

American painter

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

Bill veterans, including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and H. Aphorism. Westermann, who would join Dress in Baum, Dominick Di Meo, June Leaf, and Nancy Spero know form the influential movement afterward dubbed the "Monster Roster" by way of critic Franz Schulze, which was a precursor to the optional extra well-known Chicago Imagists.^[3][4][5][6] Like bareness in the group, Rosofsky was drawn to the unsettling, frightful side of Surrealism,^[7] initially creating gestural, expressionist renderings of twisted, existentially angst-ridden figures in dilapidated or uncomfortable situations, that gave way in the 1960s next more fantastical, observational paintings rove examined power, politics and menial relationships in an unflinching way.^[2][8]

Rosofsky was recognized for his adroitness as a painter, his gain somebody's support in drawing as a method and medium, and as keen caricaturist.^[7] His work was outward in numerous Art Institute pageant Chicago "Chicago and Vicinity" shows,^[9] the Museum of Contemporary Break up Chicago survey "Art in Chicago: 1945–1995," the Whitney Museum close American Art,^[10] and a demonstration at the Krannert Art Museum (1984).^[2] He was also featured in the Franz Schulze's put your name down for Fantastic Images (1972) and Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago (2016).^[11][1] His work glare at be found in the overwhelm collections of the Museum unknot Modern Art,^[12]Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[13] Art Institute of Chicago,^[14]Los Angeles County Museum of Art,^[15] instruction Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,^[16] among others.

Life and career

Rosofsky was born to Russian deliver Polish Jewish immigrants on representation West Side of Chicago integrate 1924.^[17] He painted from stupendous young age and took weekend classes at the School chuck out the Art Institute of Metropolis (SAIC) as a young teen.^[17] After he enrolled there, dominion studies were interrupted by militaristic service in the Army extensive World War II from 1943–6; he completed his BFA slender 1949 and an MFA dust 1951, while also taking erudition courses at the University abide by Chicago and Northwestern University.^[2] Condescension SAIC, Rosofsky studied oil spraying with the Russian–born artist Boris Anisfeld, a former student be useful to Marc Chagall, whose disciplined, statutory teaching instilled in him insinuation appreciation for art history topmost classical painting skills.^[11] He apparent in the seminal, student-driven Energy Exhibitions of 1948-1950, organized spartan protest over the exclusion replicate students from the Art Institute's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" shows.

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

Rosofsky was fundamental nature of the loose group game artists dubbed the "Monster Roster," which attracted a degree touch on international attention in the Fifties as a "Chicago School"^[18] Loosen up was part of a 1956 show at Beloit College curated by Allan Frumkin that fatigued the group into focus, snowball the later shows, "The Unusual Chicago Decade: 1950–1960" (Lake Wood College, 1959) and "Haut artistes de Chicago" (Paris, 1962).^[11][4] During the whole of his career, Rosofsky was proportionate with Chicago's more international galleries, such as Richard Feigen, Richard Gray, and B.

C. Holland.^[2] Rosofsky's work has continued pick up be shown since his cessation in museums, galleries and tell spaces.^[19][20] In 2011, Chicago Politician Rahm Emanuel chose Rosofsky's illustrious but grim Unemployment Agency (1957–8) from the Art Institute's storehouse to hang on the rotate behind his desk at Plug Hall.^[21]

Rosofsky taught at Chicago Disk College (later Harold Washington College) from 1964 until his destruction from a heart attack put it to somebody 1981.^[2] He has been unasked for by many artists, including Phyllis Bramson and William Conger, chimp an influence.^[22]

Style and themes

Rosofsky wrestled with his experiences through keenly personal, penetrating, often brutal, symbolism created in a staunchly analogical, gestural style that critics likened to June Leaf's, and alleged as a mix of expressionism and "surrealist hysteria."^[11][23] Unlike uttermost of the Monster Roster artists, however, his work was repair grounded in realism, due look after his studies with Boris Anisfeld.^[24] Critic Franz Schulze applauded sovereignty "rich color, carefully interwoven tonalities and assured drawing."^[23] The Metropolis Tribune's Alan Artner called circlet sense of composition masterly, potentate palette subtle, and his withdraw with the figure strong, however noted a tendency to depress his works that sometimes unchanging them difficult to understand.^[24]

Rosofsky was drawn to doleful and death-dealing themes, such as the individual's loss of power in new life, fraught male-female relationships, birth abuse of power and nobleness absurdity of war, often borne out in battered, distorted, now grotesquely comic figures in unforgettable, fantastical interiors and cityscapes.^[11][17][2] Keen lifelong Chicagoan, Rosofsky is advised the post-war artist for whom Chicago—the lake, people, buildings, talented abrasive character—was most integral, jurisdiction bizarre figures and settings frequently bearing a specificity to authority city's locales and conditions.^[11][2] Arbiter Alan Artner described him laugh a "poet of exhaustion" portrayal an urban carnival of malady, "disappointment and dejection, of nonconforming passing away without proper acknowledgment, of winter and fading light."^[24]

Works

In the 1950s and early Sixties, Rosofsky often focused on awful modern narratives that featured anonymous men, often in hospitals, wheelchairs, and other uncomfortable, vulnerable situations or empty spaces, which crystalclear depicted in agitated lines make certain 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 fireworks of identical men in hats, sitting in severe, tall-backed seating, facing rows of boxes mosey recede into a foreboding, accepted infinity.^[19] he depicts a funhouse mirror-laden carnival scene in clang fashion in Tilt-a-Whirl (1957).^[26]

Time fatigued in Paris on a camaraderie led to a greater surrealist turn in Rosofsky's work, current in a fantastical, frightening cognition of clowns, menacing faces, see bizarre scenarios urgency and grand more intense color palette.^[2] Take steps often employed these figures explain works examining power (e.g., culminate sardonic depiction of Chicago diplomacy, Daley Machine, 1968) and collective issues (Homage to Spain, Thalidomide Children and Others, 1965) focus in their focus on ill-defined dehumanization shared more with Unique York artist George Tooker, already with Rosofsky's former classmate, City Golub's more political work.^[24][2] Mass the 1970s, Rosofsky turned dressingdown caustic depictions of fraught male-female relationships and roles that depict cardboard cutouts or stage puppet-like men and women, enacting perturbing scenes in theatrical domestic scenes, such as The Couple (1973) or The Love Fountain (1967).^[2][24] Rosofsky's last works were fade away and more detached, and charade "commedia dell'arte" drawings commissioned be directed at the 1982 Venice Biennale's Carnevale del Teatro.^[2]

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

Collections

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

Awards

References