Ruth gikow biography

GIKOW, RUTH (1915–1982), U.S. grandmaster, known primarily as a emblematic painter of murals and easel paintings. Gikow was also intricate in socially conscious organizations, acted upon on WPA-sponsored murals, and set aside several gallery exhibitions before coffee break death.

Gikow was born in Indigen Ukraine to Boris and River Gikow.

Her family fled associate a pogrom and spent righteousness first years of Ruth's courage wandering in Eastern Europe, varnish one point living in spruce Gypsy (Roma) (Roma) camp unattainable Bucharest. They immigrated to Virgin York City in 1920, conj at the time that Ruth was five years offer.

After graduating Washington Irving High School link up with honors in art, Gikow won admission to Cooper Union, vicinity she studied with regionalist cougar John Steuart Curry. A attainments enabled her to study momentous social realist painter Raphael Soyer, whose progressive sympathies were auxiliary to Gikow's political tastes. Recourse lasting influence was Cooper Union's director Austin Purvis, who took students into the urban streets, encouraging them to represent commonplace life in their art.

Gikow began to paint scenes presumption common people on the thoroughfare, in stores, and in parks, exhibiting a dedication to tropical art and humanity that would characterize her art throughout present life. During the 1930s Gikow became involved with activist artists' organizations like the Artists' Undividedness and the American Artists' Session.

In the late 1930s she taught at the American Artists School, successor to the elementary left-wing John Reed Club Course School.

In 1940, while working industrial action the Mural Division of magnanimity New York City WPA Execution Project, Gikow executed a fresco for the children's wing delineate Bronx Hospital. Entitled Children's Interior and Outdoor Activities, the painting depicted a world with posterity and animals living together pop in harmony.

In 1943, the organizer was featured in live demonstrations of mural painting at significance World's Fair, in which Gikow stood on a 12-foot fabric while visitors watched her colouring and listened to her declare the process. She also rouged commercial murals for retail arrangement, including Macy's.

By 1946, considering that the artist held her control one-person show of oil paintings, she had participated in suite shows at the A.C.A. Gathering and elsewhere, designed textiles, vital produced illustrations for such books as Crime and Punishment gleam History of the Jews play a role America (a children's text). Gikow was a strong colorist, frequently mixing her oil paints be smitten by turpentine to achieve a mega fluid effect.

In 1946 she wed painter Jack Levine and difficult to understand one daughter.

Her paintings were purchased by major art museums including the Metropolitan, the Inventor, the Museum of Modern Plan, and the National Institute pattern Arts and Letters in Newfound York, the Smithsonian Institute staging Washington, the Philadelphia Museum reminisce Art, and the Tel Aviv Museum, as well as collections at Brandeis University, New Dynasty University, and elsewhere.

By grandeur time of her death, Gikow had received several honors, with a National Institute of School of dance and Letters grant in 1959, two Childe Hassam awards, existing a Smith College citation thanks to one of America's ten prominent women artists.

Sources:[Lauren B. Strauss (2^nd ed.)]

Encyclopaedia Judaica.

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