The Artwork of Edward Melcarth
Born at Louisville, Kentucky in January of 1914, Edward Melcarth was an American painter, photographer and sculptor who developed his own style, Social Romanticism, a Renaissance-influenced attempt
to describe man’s idealized view of himself. Active in the post-World War II art scene, Melcarth spent most of his career in New York City where he painted and sculpted images of blue-color workers, sailors, hustlers, and tradesmen.
Known for his emotionally evocative and heroic portrayals of the male figure, Melcarth focused his work on masculinity, portraiture, religion and contemporary American culture. His images of working-class men showed their grit, brute strength and determination to overcome difficulty. At the same time, the images were visual vehicles that examined gay male desire in a society that found it socially unacceptable. Melcarth’s paintings ranged in size from smaller portraits to large-scale, complex scenes of interacting figures accentuated with light and shadow.
Edward Melcarth, born Edward Epstein, was the son of the wealthy Jewish couple, Edward Epstein Sr. and Eva Ehrmann. 
His grandfather was the noted Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey distiller Hilmar Ehrmann. Melcarth’s uncle was activist lawyer and author Herbert B. Ehrmann; his aunt Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic activist and first president of the League of Women Voters.
Eva Ehrmann, after the 1920 death of her husband, remarried in 1926 to Sir Reginald Mitchell Banks, who was a Member of Parliament. The family moved to the United Kingdom where Melcarth spent his early formative years. To pursue his interests and a career, he studied at Chelsea College of Arts in London; painter Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris; and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In February of 1936, Melcarth rejected his family’s Jewish religion and changed his last name from Epstein to Melcarth, possibly a variation of Melqart, a protector god of ancient Semitic people. Although he considered himself both a communist and openly gay, he was briefly married in Paris from 1939 until the divorce in 1944. 
During World War II, Melcarth traveled with other American volunteers in 1943 to Persia where they constructed air strips for the allied forces. In 1944, he served as a seaman in the United States Merchant Marines until the end of the war. Melcarth returned to the United States in the fall of 1951 and taught briefly at Kentucky’s University of Louisville.
In February of 1952, Edward Melcarth traveled to Italy where he resided for a period at Venice’s Casa del Tre Oci, a modern neo-Gothic palace on the island of Giudecca. Melcarth returned to the United States in November of 1952 and made New York City his primary residence. His acquaintances and friends included writers Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal, photographer Thomas Painter, sexologist Alfred Kinsey, artist Henry Faulkner, art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and businessman Malcolm Forbes, who established a major collection of Melcarth’s work.
In 1957, Melcarth created a ceiling mural depicting theatrical muses for the newly renovated Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, originally the Globe Theatre, on 46th Street in Manhattan. Beginning in 1967, Melcarth worked on a two-year
project of trompe l’oeil murals and sculpted busts for the rotunda at the luxurious Pierre Hotel that faces New York’s Central Park. The painted Italian landscape murals included mythological figures and couples viewed between illusionistic columns.
Edward Melcarth relocated to Venice in 1970 where he lived until his death from cancer at the age of fifty-nine in December of 1973. Throughout his career, he taught at the University of Louisville, Parsons School of Design, Columbia University, the University of Washington, and New York’s Art Students League. Melcarth received both a grant and the Childe Hassam purchase award from the Institute of Arts and Letters, Chicago Art Institute’s Altman Prize, and the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke Award.
Notes: Edward Melcarth’s papers, correspondence, and writings are housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/edward-melcarth-papers-7865
An article by museum curator Hunter Kissel entitled “Illuminating the Underrepresented: Presenting Edward Melcarth” can be found at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c3cc8a11aef1d1735f564f7/t/5cf29f0ad328900001e55860/1559404302304/IlluminatingTheUnderrepresented.pdf
The bi-monthly literary and history magazine Gay & Lesbian Review has an interview between writer Taylor Lewandowski and painter Richard Taddei, a former student and friend of Melcarth, on its site: https://glreview.org/article/richard-taddei-on-his-mentor-edward-melcarth/