Arthur George Murphy

Lithographs by Arthur George Murphy

Born in Tiffin, Ohio in January of 1906, Arthur George Murphy was a lithographer, painter and educator. He began his initial art education at the Cleveland School of Art. After relocating to New York City, Murphy studied for two years at the Art Students’ League under painter and illustrator Boardman Robinson and anatomy and figure drawing teacher George Bridgeman.

Murphy worked for a short time as a cartoonist for Chicago and New York newspapers. In 1930, he relocated to San Francisco where he continued his studies at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. Murphy also studied briefly at Colorado Springs’ Broadmoor Art Academy from 1932 to 1934. After his studies, he abandoned commercial art to devote his time to fine art.

In August of 1935, the Federal Art Project was established as part of the New Deal program to fund visual arts in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression era. Between 1935 and 1940, Arthur Murphy worked on California’s Federal Art Project for which he produced murals and almost one hundred lithographs. Included among his many works are lithographs documenting the construction of both the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges.

During the years of World War II, Arthur George Murphy served as a war artist and correspondent in the South Pacific area. After his discharge from service, he relocated permanently to Connecticut where he taught at the Whitney School of Art, which became part of Paier College, Bridgeport, in 1954, and at the private Quinnipiac College located in Hamden, Connecticut.

Exhibitions of Murphy’s work included a 1934 mural for a public works project in southern California, an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Association in 1937, an exhibition at the De Young Museum in 1939, a 1941 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and an exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey.

Arthur George Murphy died at the age of eighty-five in Old Saybrock, Connecticut in 1991. His work is housed in both private and public collections including that of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, Philadelphia’s Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the University of Kentucky Art Museum, among others.

Top Insert Image: Arthur George Murphy, “Ballet Dancers, Ballet Russe”, 1939, Lithograph, 41.3 x 29.2 cm, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

Bottom Insert Image: Arthur George Murphy, “Steel Riggers, Bay Bridge”, 1936, Lithograph, 39.4 x 30.5 cm, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota

Harry Sternberg

The Artwork of Harry Sternberg

Born to Russian-Hungarian parents in New York City in July of 1904, Harry Sternberg was an American printmaker, painter and educator. The youngest of eight children, he spent his childhood in Brooklyn where, at the age of nine, he began art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Sternberg studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1922 to 1926. He rented a studio in the Greenwich Village area after graduation and began a career in etching, painting, and printmaking.

Sternberg had his first exhibition of work in 1931 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of the first exhibitions held at the museum’s West 8th Street address in the West Village area. In 1933, Sternberg was added as an instructor to the staff of the Arts Student League of New York, a position he would hold for the next thirty-five years. Among the students he trained were Charles Wilbert White Jr, known for his chronicling of Afro-American related subjects; painter and graphic artist Isabel Bishop, known for her scenes of everyday life in Manhattan; and artist and teacher Knox Martin, who became one of the leading members of the New York School of artists and writers.

After meeting painter Frida Kahlo and her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, in 1934, Harry Sternberg became more active in union and socialist causes. He became involved with the government’s Works Progress Administration, WPA, in 1935 as a technical advisor to the Graphic Art Division of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program to fund the visual arts in the United States. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1936, Sternberg spent a year studying the conditions of workers in steel mills and coal mines. The drawings, etchings and paintings from this period, depicting life in the industrial areas of the United States, later influenced the composition of his mural designs.

Sternberg painted his first WPA mural. commissioned by the Department of the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture, for the lobby of the Sellersville Post Office in Pennsylvania. The twelve-foot long 1937 “Carrying the Mail”, depicting the placing of mail in a letterbox and its delivery, was executed in tempera on canvas. Upon its completion, Sternberg traveled to Chicago, where he studied the city’s history, architecture, and industry for his next commissioned mural.

In 1938, Harry Sternberg created his twenty-four foot mural, “Chicago: Epoch of a Great City”, for the Lakeview Post Office in Chicago’s West Side. The painting shows the different stages of the city’s growth and its great industries in four areas: steel, electric power, the stockyards, and the manufacture of farm equipment. In the central portion of the mural is a scene depicting the great Chicago fire of 1871; located above that scene, is an image of the vibrant, modern-day Chicago. Due to years of exposure, a two-year restoration project for the mural was undertaken by Parma Conservation of Chicago from 2001 to 2003.

In addition to teaching at the Art Students League in New York, Sternberg also taught printmaking from 1942 to 1945 at the New School for Social Research. After retiring from the Student League and moving with his family to California, he established a studio in the city of Escondido where he continued to work as an artist. Sternberg also taught painting at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts until 1969. He participated from 1969 to 1978 in the Orme School Fine Arts Festival which exposed students to the instruction and work of professional artists. In 1990, Sternberg published “Sternberg: A Life in Woodcuts”, a collection of his prints produced over the years.

A major retrospective exhibition of his life and oeuvre was presented in 2000, entitled “No Sun Without Shadow: The Art of Harry Sternberg”, at the Museum of the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. Harry Sternberg died in November of 2001. He is the author of two books: “Composition: The Anatomy of Picture Making” and”Woodcut”.

You Insert Image: Harry Sternberg, “Poodle and the Clown”, circa 1950s, Lithograph, 40.6 x 30.5 cm, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Photographer Unknown,”Harry Sternberg in Studio”, Date Unknown

Bottom Insert Image: Harry Sternberg, “Chicago, Epoch of a Great City”, 1937, Mural Detail (Welder), Lakeview Post Office, Chicago

Simkha Simkhovitch

Simkha Simkhovitch,”Fishermen”, 1948, Pencil, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper on Board, 73.3 x 45.7 cm, Private Collection

Born in the city of Novozybkov in June of 1885, Simka Faibusovich Simkhovitch was a Russian artist. He began drawing at the age of seven when confined to his room with a severe case of measles. In 1905, Simkhovitch started studying at the Grekov Odessa Art School, one of the oldest art schools in the Ukraine. Upon his graduation in 1911, he received a recommendation for admittance to the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, which was considered a notable honor at that time.

Though he began courses in architecture, sculpture and painting, Simkhovitch was dismissed from the Imperial Academy in December of 1911 due to the quota on Jewish students and was drafted into the army. During the first World War, he served as a private until his demobilization in 1912, at which time he reenrolled at the Imperial Academy. Like many others, Simkhovitch was caught in the chaos of the Russian Revolution in 1917; however, he survived and continued his work under the new Soviet government.

In 1918, Simka Simkhovitch exhibited paintings and sculptures in an exhibition of Russian Jewish artists and, in 1919, placed first in “The Great Russian Revolution” competition with his painting “Russian Revolution”. This painting was added to Saint Petersburg’s historical State Museum of Revolution’s collection. Simkhovitch exhibited his work at the 1922 International Book Fair held in Florence, Italy. Two years later, he traveled to the United States for the purpose of illustrating Soviet textbooks; however, once in the country, he made the decision to immigrate and remain in New York City.

Initially supporting himself by portrait commissions and commercial art, Simkhovitch was hired to paint a theatrical screen for the play “The Command to Love” which was playing at Broadway’s Longacre Theater. This started his career as a screen painter for the theater and brought him to the attention of screenwriter Ernest Pascal, known for his screenplay of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, who gave him work as an illustrator. Pascal, in turn, introduced Simkhovitch to gallery owner Marie Sterner who purchased two paintings and held solo exhibitions of his work at her gallery in 1927 and 1928. These shows were followed by a solo exhibition of his circus paintings, also at the Marie Sterner Gallery, in 1929.

Simka Simkhovitch moved in the early 1930s with his wife, Elsa, and his three daughters to Conneticutt where he established a studio in his house. There he continued to produce works by commission during the Great Depression years. After a solo exhibition at New York City’s Helen Hackett Gallery in 1931, Simka Simkhovitch became one of the featured artists at the 1931 exhibition held at San Fransisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor located in Lincoln Park. Coordinated by Marie Sterner, the exhibition featured four of Simkhovitch’s watercolors, including his “Nudes”, now in a private collection.

Beginning in 1936, Simkhovitch began working with the Works Progress Administration, WPA, painting murals for public buildings in the United States. His first work was a 1938 mural for the Jackson, Mississippi, post office and courthouse. Painted on the wall behind the judge’s bench, “Pursuits of Life in Mississippi”, a depiction of black workers engaged in manual labor amid scenes of white professionals and socialites, was eventually covered over in later years during renovations due to its stereotypical imagery.

In 1936 after winning a competition for the work, Simkhovitch received a commission for four murals at the Beaufort, North Carolina, post office. Upon his return to Conneticutt, he painted the four mural panels depicting the 1886 tragedy of the schooner Crissie Wright, driven onto rocks off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina, during a winter storm, which resulted in the deaths of all six sailors, four frozen to death. These panels were installed in the Beaufort post office in 1938. The completed mural was later restored in the 1990s by Elisabeth Speight, the daughter of two muralist who had worked with the WPA.

In February of 1949, Simka Simkhovitch purchased a home in Milford, Conneticutt for his family; the property included a barn which was to be his studio. While in the process of moving, he developed pneumonia and died two weeks later on the 25th of February, at the age of fifty-six. Simkhovitch’s work is in private collections and in numerous museums, including the Polish National Museum in Krakow, the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington DC, and the Whitney Museum in New York City. A collection of his papers is housed in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution.

Top Insert Image: Simka Simkovitch, Title and Date Unknown, (Picnic), Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Middle Insert Image: Simkha Simkhovitch, “Self Portrait with Family”, Date Unknown, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Simka Simkovitch “Boxers”, 1932. Oil on Canvas, Private Collection

Joseph Hirsch

Joseph Hirsch, “Mercy Ship”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 122 x 97 cm , US Navy Art Collection

Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch won a four-year scholarship from the city of Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. He studied the realist tradition of painter Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts. After graduation, Hirsch studied privately in New York City under social realist painter George Luks, a founder of the Ashcan School of painting and one of the “Eight”, a group which favored painting scenes of urban life.

After the death of George Luks in 1933, Hirsch studied with painter Henry Hensche, who impressed with the colors of the impressionists, had started his own studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The awarding of a Woolley Fellowship in 1935 enabled Hirsch to expand his experiences by traveling throughout Europe for one year. He visited Egypt and areas of Asia before his return to the United States in November of 1936. During the 1930s, Joseph Hirsch’s art career received a boost through employment with the Works Progress Administration in Philadelphia, for whom he completed murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the city’s Municipal Court.

During World War II as a member of the Associated American Artists, Hirsch worked for Abbott Laboratories where he produced artworks to illustrate the war effort. The most widely produced war bond poster was his 1942 “Till We Meet Again”. Continuing his style of capturing ordinary people and moments, Hirsch worked with fellow artist Georges Schreiber at the Pensacola Naval Air Station documenting Naval aviation training. From there he went to the South Pacific to document the efforts of Navy medicine and, later, covered Army operations on the Italian front and in North Africa.

Joseph Hirsch was a founding member of the Artists Equity, organized in 1949 in New York City to protect the rights of visual artists. Awarded a 1949 Fulbright Fellowship, Hirsch and his family resided for a period in France for study and work. During this time, the political climate in the United States became hostile to those holding unpopular views. This led to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s speech in 1950 denouncing Communists in the US State Department. Awarded a year extension on his Fellowship, Hirsch sold his Cape Cod home and remained with his family in Paris.

In March of 1952 on the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman George Dondero denounced Artist Equity as a front organization for Communists. This resulted in blacklisting a number of Artist Equity member artists and the denouncement of Hirsch as a Communist sympathizer. Due to this action, Hirsch and his family did not return to the United States until 1955. After his return, Hirsch continued his successful career of selling paintings and working on commissions. In the 1960s to 1970s, Hirsch experimented by using a series of layered image planes, instead of lines of perspective, to suggest depth on his canvases. This series of figurative images appear as snapshots that captured its subjects in mid-action instead of posed postions.

Joseph Hirsch taught at the National Academy of Design from 1959 to 1967, and the Art Students League of New York from 1967 until his death in September of 1981, He was also artist-in-residence a the University of Utah, Utah State University, Dartmouth College and Brigham Young University. The Library of Congress twice awarded him the Joseph Pennell Prize for Lithography for his 1944 “Lunch Hour” and the 1945 “The Confidence”. Among many other awards, he won the 1968 Carnegie Prize by the Carnegie Museum of Art for his body of work.

Note: Joseph Hirsch’s 1943 “Mercy Ship” depicts the U.S. Navy Hospital ship, USS Solace, with its crew. Functioning as a floating medical treatment facility, the Navy’s hospital ships operated under the laws laid down by the Geneva Convention, as such they were unarmed, fully illuminated at night, and painted white.

Built as the passenger ship SS Iroquois in 1927, it was acquired by the US Navy in July of 1940, renamed Solace, converted into a hospital ship, and commissioned on August 9, 1941. She was at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack, December 7th of 1941, where she pulled men from the burning oil-covered water and evacuated crews of damaged ships. The USS Solace received seven battle stars for her distinguished service in World War II.

Top Insert Image: Juley & Son, “Joseph Hirsch”, 1959,Juley&Son, Gelatin Silver Print, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Second Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Window in Spring”, 1948, Oil on Canvas, 111.8 x 60.1 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “The Naked Man”, 1959-1962, Oil on Canvas, 188.6 x 130.1 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Bottom Insert Image: Joseph Hirsch, “Satisfaction Plus”, 1943, Oil on Canvas, 109.2 x 129.5 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command Museum

John Augustus Walker

John Augustus Walker, “Science and Invention”, Mural, 1935

John Augustus Walker (1901-1967) was a well-known Alabama Gulf Coast artist of the Depression era who was commissioned to undertake several art projects for the Works Progress Administration. Walker’s preferred subject matter ranged from Mardi Gras, fantasy and historical themes to landscapes and portraiture.

The murals are on display in the History Museum of Mobile lobby located in Mobile, Alabama.