We continue our stream of posts about artists who were helped by Francis Quirk by looking at Ruth Gikow.
Gikow's career - from aspiring commercial artist to recognized fine artist - began in New York City, where her family settled after fleeing an antisemitic pogrom in the Ukraine. She had been born there on Jan. 6, 1915. During their two year flight they had wandered through Europe including a year outside Bucharest in a gypsy camp. In 1920 her family immigrated to the United States including her father, Boris Gikow, a photographer, and her mother, Lena. They settled on the Lower East Side, where Gikow grew up in poverty. With a zest for living she never lost, she overcame the language barrier quickly and survived the teeming streets, diverting her tough cronies with chalk drawings on the sidewalk. She won distinction for her artwork at Washington Irving High School, which had one of the strongest art departments in New York City.
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| Ruth Gikow with her family c 1950 including husband Jack Levine and Daughter Susanna |
She intended to pursue a career as a fashion artist after graduating from high school in 1932. Instead, unable to find a job, she enrolled at Cooper Union, where she was a pupil of the American regionalist painter John Steuart Curry and Austin Purvis, Jr., director of the school. She was determined, she said jokingly years later, ''to make a lot of money so I could have a French maid.''As she had throughout high school, Gikow continued to support herself and contribute to the family income by working evenings at Woolworth’s.
During her studies at Cooper Union, Gikow abandoned her aspiration to do commercial work and chose painting instead. A fellowship during her second year allowed her to study privately with idealistic young Raphael Soyer. A review of his work will show some similarities in technique. Soon an informal exhibition of her work, painted in a social realist style, was held at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. From then on, her subjects remained the urban environment and the vast multiplicity of its inhabitants.
As an impoverished young woman, she joined the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration as a muralist, an assigment, she later said, compatible with her desire to bring art ''to the people.'In 1939, she was commissioned to paint murals for the children's ward at Bronx Hospital, Riker's Island and Rockefeller Center. We have not been able to find images of these works. With some associates, she helped found the American Serigraph Society, which turned out a volume of original graphics within the range of people of modest means.
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| Ruth Gikow Tunnel of Horrors 1935 through WPA |
Following World War II, after a brief career in commercial art, she met and married artist Jack Levine. Challenged by his dedication and commitment, she returned to her own painting and drawing with renewed vigor. She illustrated Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and began to exhibit at New York's Weyhe Gallery, Grand Central Galleries, Nordness Gallery, Forum Gallery and the Kennedy Galleries. Her endless quest to find humanity in a turbulent and sometimes hostile environment led art critic Henry-Russell Hitchcock to describe her as one of the country's "ten outstanding women painters."
By 1946, the time of her first one-woman show, Gikow had settled into Expressionism. Two years later, a critic found that Gikow was making ''extraordinary progress'' as ''her mood deepened in a new maturity.'' By the early 1960's, most of her paintings were of people, caught in a variety of moods as she emerged as an Early Modernist.
One representative painting, ''Kleptomaniac,'' showed a prim elderly woman with fear and humiliation on her face. It was inspired by something that Miss Gikow had seen years before when she was working at Woolworth's. The prim, elderly woman had been caught stealing a tiny bottle of perfume.''An artist must constantly refer to life to get a living, growing art,'' Miss Gikow said. We have sought out images of this painting without success. However, the painting below may be an apt illustration of her work and the accompanying description from an exhibition held at the George Grevsky Gallery describes it well.
"Nowhere are these themes more clearly relevant than in Adoration of the Gadget, 1969. In this painting, various people are preoccupied by their cameras, hair dryers, and other electronic devices. Gikow, however, is not praising the rise in home electronics, but is commenting on the captivation of the human mind by that which it does not fully understand." - Text from George Krevsky Gallery
The people she painted seldom were anchored in a particular place, but instead seemed to hover on the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the figures were almost fluid, an effect that Gikow helped to achieve by using oils thinned by turpentine. Against 'Facelessnes'I wanted to get underneath things,'' Gikow said, ''to be more involved with individuals, and to get away from facelessness.'' Miss Gikow's last show, at the Kennedy Galleries in 1979, was almost entirely of people - sitting, standing, walking, running, dancing and, matter of factly, growing old.
The two works below as are renditions of the same image in two different media. Since she reproduced the work, she must have had some affinity for it.
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| Ruth Gikow- The Kitchen print |
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| Ruth Gikow- The Kitchen oil on canvas |
The works below show Gikow's range of style, technique and media.
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| Ruth Gikow- Ballerinas |
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| Ruth Gikow- Interior lithograph |
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| Ruth Gikow- Psychosis- Two Napoleons and a Josephine screen print |
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| Ruth Gikow- Seance |
Gikow's work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Portland Museum of Art, Maine, National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, Hartford Arts Foundation, Connecticut, and the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio. Among her awards were an Institute of Arts and Letters grant and a Childe Hassam Fund Award.
If you are a fan of her work, or if this blog has piqued your interest, you may be able to locate or purchase a work through the George Krevsky Gallery.
