Arthur Szyk

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Arthur Szyk (ca.1946)

Arthur Szyk (born June 3, 1894 in Łódź , Poland - † September 13, 1951 in New Canaan , Connecticut ) was an American - Polish artist. He is considered one of the most important draftsmen of political illustrations and caricatures of the 20th century.

Life

Portrait of Julia Szyk, Paris 1926.

Arthur Szyk was born to Jewish parents. In 1909 he began to study art at the Académie Julian in Paris and in 1913 an art study in Krakow . A year later, in 1914, he joined the Russian Army .

In 1916 he married Julia Liekerman, with whom he had two children. The son George was born in 1917, the daughter Alexandra in 1922. 1919–1920 he was the artistic director of the propaganda department for the army in Lodz. In 1921 he moved to Paris and illustrated French books in the following years.

In 1931 he was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit by the Polish government for his exhibitions abroad at the Musée Galliera in Paris and the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva . In 1934 he moved back to Poland. In 1939 Szyk fled to the United States of America. In 1943 his mother and her companion were taken from the Łódź ghetto and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin .

Arthur Szyk was granted American citizenship on May 22, 1948. 1951 Szyk had before the House Un-American Activities Committee (US Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities of the) responsibility. He stated that he was not a member of any communist organization. Arthur Szyk died of a heart attack at the end of the summer of 1951 .

Act

To Be Shot as Dangerous Enemies of the Third Reich (" To Be Shot As Dangerous Enemies Of The Third Reich "). Drawing by Arthur Szyk, first published in 1943 in the New York daily PM , later on donation stamps for the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.

The Americans liked Szyk's works and called him "Soldier of Art" because of the fight against the Nazi regime and the Axis powers allied with him. His work has been published in the New York Post , New York Times, and Collier’s .

In the USA, Szyk created pointed caricatures and illustrations, mostly with a political background. These were directed in favor of Allied war efforts against human rights violations. Adolf Hitler's militarism and anti-Semitism and his dictatorial approach spurred Szyk's advocacy of saving Jews during World War II .

Szyk's first caricatures about Hitler in the mid-1930s portray the Nazi leader as an enemy of the Jews. For Szyk, Hitler reflected the Germany of the time. For him Hitler was “Germany without a mask”, and for Hitler Szyk was just a “cheap Jew” who portrayed Hitler as the embodiment of evil, for example as the Hun King Attila . Thus he was described by Eleanor Roosevelt as a "one-man-army" against Hitler. Even during and after World War II, Szyk caricatured Hitler as a crazy, terrorist conqueror.

Arthur Szyk's work reflects the style of the 16th century. Szyk's art was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means of promoting tolerance , human dignity and freedom . His expressive works draw attention to the suffering of Jews in the world. In Szyk's works, mass murders become clear, which are characterized by piled up skulls and bones, organs and dead people who were killed in the gas chamber or execution . He believed that the Jews lived their lives as assertive actors in shaping their own destiny after suffering for a long time.

In addition to this political work, Szyk also illustrated the book Job of the Bible: The Book of Job for the Heritage Press New York 1944 as well as fairy tale books: 1945 Andersen's Fairy Tales and, posthumously published in 1955, The Arabian Nights Entertainment .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Arthur Szyk: Pictures against National Socialism and Terror / Drawing Against National Socialism and Terror at Deutsches Kunstverlag
  2. ↑ http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/arthur-szyk/biographie.html
  3. ↑ a b Historisches Museum introduces illustrator Arthur Szyk  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.tagesspiegel.de  

literature

  • Katja Widmann, Johannes Zechner (Ed.): Arthur Szyk. Pictures against National Socialism and Terror / Drawing Against National Socialism and Terror . Catalog for the exhibition in the German Historical Museum Berlin in collaboration with the Arthur Szyk Society, Burlingame, USA, August 29, 2008 to January 4, 2009, Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-422-06841-4 / ISBN 978-3-86102-151-3 .
  • Claus Stephani : The image of the Jew in modern painting. An introduction. / Imaginea evreului în pictura modernă. Introductiv study. Bilingual edition (Romanian / German). Editura Hasefer: Bucharest, 2005. ISBN 973-630-091-9
  • "Arthur Szyk - Soldier in Art: Rare Polish Poster from World War II Discovered" by Zbigniew Kantorosinski with Joseph P. Ansell, The Library of Congress Information Bulletin , September 5, 1994, p. 329

Web links

Commons : Arthur Szyk  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Szyk, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Polish artist
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź , Poland
DATE OF DEATH September 13, 1951
Place of death New Canaan , Connecticut, United States