Bernard Childs

Bernard Childs (born September 1, 1910 in Brooklyn , New York City , New York , † March 27, 1985 in New York City, New York ) was an American painter and printmaker . He was one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism .

Bernard Childs was born to Russian immigrants in 1910 in Brooklyn / New York. He grew up in Harrisburg , Pennsylvania , and studied there from 1928 to 1930 at the University of Pennsylvania . He moved to New York in 1930 and had to make a living doing odd jobs and auxiliary jobs. In the evening he attended the Art Students League and took drawing lessons from Kimon Nicolaides . Childs had to give up his artistic activity in the meantime when he could no longer finance it.

During the Second World War he began to draw again during his military service. After the end of the war he took artistic lessons again from 1947, this time with Amédée Ozenfant in New York. In the 1950s and 1960s, Bernard Childs went on numerous study trips and stayed for long periods in France , Italy and Japan . At the end of the 1950s he lived in Paris , from 1966 to 1977 alternately in Paris and New York.

Bernard Childs left an extensive body of work. His work includes numerous paintings and graphics. His style is very complex. In the 1950s he developed his own abstract style in his pictures. He used signs and symbols and worked with methods of surrealist automatism. From the mid-1950s onwards, he increasingly worked with printmaking . His work received international attention and recognition. In 1959 he was a participant in documenta 2 in Kassel in the graphics department.

In the 1960s, Childs painted portraits in an expressionist style. After a study trip to Japan, he began to experiment with different materials and to incorporate them into his painting. Among other things, he used sand , silicon carbide and brick dust , which he mixed with the oil paint. He painted gloomy paintings with political content, for example on the Holocaust or an impending nuclear war . From the mid-1960s, his painting became more colorful and cheerful. He dealt with love and sexuality, later he dealt with light and lighting and worked with transparent acrylic sheets .

Web links

• Examples of his work and biographical notes