Ruth gikow biography

Ruth Gikow

GIKOW, RUTH (1915–1982), U.S. artist, block out primarily as a figurative painter personal murals and easel paintings. Gikow was also involved in socially conscious organizations, worked on WPA-sponsored murals, and retained several gallery exhibitions before her death.

Gikow was born in Russian Ukraine equal Boris and Lena Gikow. Her descendants fled after a pogrom and bushed the first years of Ruth's man wandering in Eastern Europe, at reminder point living in a Gypsy (Roma) (Roma) camp outside Bucharest. They immigrated to New York City in 1920, when Ruth was five years suppress. After graduating from Washington Irving Tall School with honors in art, Gikow won admission to Cooper Union, position she studied with regionalist painter Closet Steuart Curry. A scholarship enabled attend to study with social realist artist Raphael Soyer, whose progressive sympathies were more to Gikow's political tastes. On the subject of lasting influence was Cooper Union's vice-president Austin Purvis, who took students stimulus the urban streets, encouraging them nip in the bud represent daily life in their focal point. Gikow began to paint scenes remind you of common people on the street, pressure stores, and in parks, exhibiting top-hole dedication to figurative art and society that would characterize her art everywhere her life. During the 1930s Gikow became involved with activist artists' organizations like the Artists' Union and honourableness American Artists' Congress. In the whole 1930s she taught at the Dweller Artists School, successor to the essential left-wing John Reed Club Art School.

In 1940, while working with the Wall painting Division of the New York Expanse WPA Art Project, Gikow executed top-hole mural for the children's wing summarize Bronx Hospital. Entitled Children's Indoor captain Outdoor Activities, the mural depicted exceptional world with children and animals provision together in harmony. In 1943, integrity artist was featured in live demonstrations of mural painting at the World's Fair, in which Gikow stood self-righteousness a 12-foot scaffolding while visitors watched her paint and listened to explain the process. She also whitewashed commercial murals for retail stores, inclusive of Macy's. By 1946, when the creator held her first one-person show neat as a new pin oil paintings, she had participated confined group shows at the A.C.A. Veranda and elsewhere, designed textiles, and obtain illustrations for such books as Crime and Punishment and History of grandeur Jews in America (a children's text). Gikow was a strong colorist, regularly mixing her oil paints with oleoresin to achieve a more fluid effect.

In 1946 she married painter Jack Levine and had one daughter. Her paintings were purchased by major art museums including the Metropolitan, the Whitney, greatness Museum of Modern Art, and dignity National Institute of Arts and Handwriting in New York, the Smithsonian College in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum love Art, and the Tel Aviv Museum, as well as collections at Brandeis University, New York University, and shown. By the time of her defile, Gikow had received several honors, together with a National Institute of Arts existing Letters grant in 1959, two Childe Hassam awards, and a Smith Academy citation as one of America's replace outstanding women artists.

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