Born: June 16, 1894, in Lodz (Russian partition of Poland, presently Lodz, Poland)
Died: September 13, 1951, New Canaan, Connecticut, USA
Early days. Artur Szyk was born into a Jewish family. His father, Salomon Szyk was a textile factory director. His mother- Eugenia Rogacka. Even though his family was culturally assimilated and did not practice Orthodox Judaism, Arthur liked drawing biblical scenes from the Hebrew Bible. These talents prompted his father to send him to Paris to study at Académie Julian. In Paris he was especially attracted by the medieval art of illuminating manuscripts, which greatly influenced his later works. During the years 1912-1914 the teenage artist produced numerous drawings and caricatures on contemporary political themes published in the Łódź satirical magazine Śmiech. After four years in France, he returned to partitioned Poland in 1913 and continued his studies in Axentowicz's class at Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (then Austrian partition of Poland). He actively participated in Kraków's cultural life. He also designed the stage sets and costumes for the Łódź-based Bi Ba Bo cabaret. Szyk concidered himself to be a Polish patriot but he was also proud of being Jewish and often opposed anti-Semitism in his works.
Career. At the beginning of 1914, Szyk and other Polish-Jewish artists and writers set off on a journey to Palestine. Because of the outbreak of World War I. Szyk, a Russian subject, had to leave Palestine, and go back home in August 1914. He was conscripted into the Russian army and fought at the battle of Lodz in November/December 1914, but at the beginning of 1915 he escaped from the army and spent the rest of the war in his home city. In September 1916, he married Julia Liekerman. They had two children: Jerzy and Aleksandra. In 1919, in independent Poland, he published, together with poet Julian Tuwim, the first political book which was illustrated by him: Rewolucja w Niemczech (Revolution in Germany), a satire on the Germans. In the same year, Szyk took part in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1920), in which he served as a cavalry officer and as the artistic director of the propaganda department of the Polish army in Lodz. In 1921 Szyk and his family moved to Paris where they were staying till 1937. Now he started making illustrations in full color. The first one was the Book of Esther (1925), followed by other books. During his stay in France he often visited his home country-Poland- illustrated books and exhibited his works there. During the late 1920s, he illustrated the Statute of Kalisz, a charter of liberties granted to the Jews by Boleslaw the Pious, the Duke of Kalisz, Poland, in 1264. He showed there the contribution of the Jews to Polish society, including their participation in Poland's pro-independence struggle, for example during the January Uprising of 1863 or in the Polish Legions in World War I commanded by Jozef Pilsudski, to whom Szyk dedicated his work published in 1932. Postcards with reproductions of Szyk's illustrations were published in Kraków around 1927. His work was shown at exhibitions in Warsaw, Łódź and Kalisz in 1929, and a "Traveling Exhibition of Artur Szyk's Works" was held in 1932/33. In recognition for his work, he was decorated with the Gold Cross of Merit by the Polish government. Another series created by Szyk was Washington and his Times, which he began in Paris in 1930. It brought another decoration to Szyk –the George Washington Bicentennial Medal. In 1933 Szyk started drawing Hitler’s caricatures. Next series of Szyk's drawings – Haggadah, is about the departure of the Israelites from ancient Egypt published in London in 1940 and according to The Times, "worthy to be placed among the most beautiful of books that the hand of man has ever produced". Szyk's twenty paintings, which were exhibited in the Polish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, depicted the contribution of the Poles to the history of the United States. In January 1940, the exhibition of his 72 caricatures entitled War and "Kultur" in Poland was opened at the Fine Art Society in London. As the reviewer of The Times wrote: There are three leading motives in the exhibition: the brutality of the Germans – and the more primitive savagery of the Russians, the heroism of the Poles, and the suffering of the Jews. In July 1940, Arthur Szyk left Britain to North America, with the support of the British government and the Polish government-in-exile, on assignment to popularize the struggle of the British and Polish nations with Nazism in the New World. After a brief stay in Canada, in December 1940, Szyk and his family went to New York City where he lived till 1945. His album The New Order, was published in 1941, after the artist had arrived in America. Soon after his arrival in the US, Szyk illustrated a Four Freedoms Award. His caricatures of the leaders of the Axis powers (Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito) appeared in newspapers, magazines, on posters, postcards and stamps, in secular, religious and military publications, on public and military buildings. More than 25 exhibitions were staged altogether in the United States during the war years. At the end of the war, in 1945, his drawing Two down and One to go was used in a propaganda film. In recognition for his services in the fight against aggression, Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President F. D. Roosevelt, said of him: "This is a personal war of Szyk against Hitler, and I do not think that Mr. Szyk will lose this war!" The artist also perceived racial tensions in the United States and the fact that the black population did not have the same rights as the whites. Szyk's attitude to his mother country, Poland, was full of contradictions. Even though he regarded himself both as Jewish and Polish and showed the suffering of the Poles (not only those of Jewish descent) in the occupied Polish territories in his drawings, even though he benefited from financial support of the Polish government-in-exile (at least at the beginning of the war), he also presented that government in a negative light, especially at the end of World War II. In a drawing of 1944, a group of debating Polish politicians are shown as opponents of Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, the "Bolshevik agent" Winston Churchill, and at the same time adherents of Father Charles Coughlin, known for his anti-Semitic views. Around 1943, Szyk, a former participant in the Polish-Soviet war, also completely changed his opinions on the Soviet Union. His admiration for the Soviet Union started to grow after Germany's aggression against the USSR in 1941, and his drawing from 1944 shows a soldier of the Moscow-supported People's Army of Poland next to a Soviet soldier, both liberating Poland. In 1940, he illustrated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1943, the artist started work on illustrations for the Book of Job and also illustrated collections of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault (Mother Goose). In 1945, Szyk and his family moved from New York City to New Canaan, Connecticut where he lived till the end of his life. After the war the artist returned to book illustrations. He was also commissioned by Canadian entrepreneur and stamp connoisseur, Kasimir Bileski, to illustrate the United Nations Series of stamps. Szyk was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being a member of the Joint Ant-Fascist Refugee Committee and six other suspicious organizations. Szyk himself, however, repudiated these accusations of alleged sympathy for communism in a written statement. Szyk died of a heart attack in 1951. In 1991 when The Arthur Szyk Society was set up in California. The Society's work resulted in staging many exhibitions of his works. In Europe, since the late 1990s exhibitions of his art has been mounted in the Polish cities of Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź as well as in Berlin, Germany.
Sources
. This bio is an abbreviation and modification of an article appearing in Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
Wikipedia
See also:
Copies of some of his works (Polish description)
Copies of his other work (several related to Poland)
The Arthur Szyk Society
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