Chaim Gross (March 17, 1902 – May 5, 1991) was an American
sculptor
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...
and educator of Ukrainian Jewish origin.
Childhood
Gross was born to a Jewish family in Austrian
Galicia, in the village of Wolowa (now known as
Mizhhiria
Mizhhiria ( uk, Міжгір'я; ; ro, Boureni) is an urban-type settlement in Khust Raion of Zakarpattia Oblast in western Ukraine. The town is also the administrative center of Mizhhiria Raion (raion, district), housing the district's local ad ...
,
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
), in the
Carpathian Mountains
The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The range stretches ...
. In 1911, his family moved to
Kolomyia
Kolomyia, formerly known as Kolomea ( ua, Коломия, Kolomyja, ; pl, Kołomyja; german: Kolomea; ro, Colomeea; yi, ), is a city located on the Prut River in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast (province), in western Ukraine. It serves as the admi ...
(which was annexed into the
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
in 1939 and became part of newly independent
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
in 1991). During
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
, Russian forces invaded
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...
; amidst the turmoil, the Grosses fled Kolomyia. They returned when Austria retook the town in 1915, refugees of the war. When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to
Budapest
Budapest (, ; ) is the capital and most populous city of Hungary. It is the ninth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits and the second-largest city on the Danube river; the city has an estimated population ...
to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter
Béla Uitz
Béla Uitz (8 March 1887, Mehála, Kingdom of Hungary (today part of Timișoara, Romania) – 26 January 1972, Budapest, Hungary) was a Hungarian painter and communist activist.
In 1907 he studied at the Hungarian National School of Applied Art ...
, though within a year a new regime under
Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya ( hu, Vitéz nagybányai Horthy Miklós; ; English: Nicholas Horthy; german: Nikolaus Horthy Ritter von Nagybánya; 18 June 1868 – 9 February 1957), was a Hungarian admiral and dictator who served as the Regent o ...
took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the
Kunstgewerbeschule
A Kunstgewerbeschule (English: ''School of Arts and Crafts'' or S''chool of Applied Arts'') was a type of vocational arts school that existed in German-speaking countries from the mid-19th century. The term Werkkunstschule was also used for thes ...
in
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
,
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
shortly before immigrating to the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
in 1921.
Emigration from Austria to U.S.
Gross' brother Naftoli had arrived in New York City in 1914. He sent money to his brothers Chaim and Avrom-Lieb, who traveled from Vienna to Le Havre, France, where they took a boat to New York City in March 1921.
Early Career 1921-1933
Gross's studies continued in the United States at the
Beaux-Arts Institute of Design
The Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (BAID, later the National Institute for Architectural Education) was an art and architectural school at 304 East 44th Street in Turtle Bay, Manhattan, in New York City.[Elie Nadelman
Elie Nadelman (born Eliasz Nadelman; February 20, 1882 – December 28, 1946) was a Polish-American sculptor, draughtsman and collector of folk art.
Early years
Nadelman was born and studied briefly in Warsaw and then visited Munich in 1902 ...]
and others, and at the
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school at 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists.
Although artists may stu ...
, with
Robert Laurent
Robert Laurent (June 29, 1890 – April 20, 1970) was a French-American modernist figurative sculptor, printmaker and teacher. His work, the ''New York Times'' wrote,"figured in the development of an American sculptural art that balanced natu ...
. He also attended the
Educational Alliance
Educational Alliance is a leading social institution that has been serving communities in New York City’s Lower Manhattan since 1889. It provides multi-generational programs and services in education, health and wellness, arts and culture, and c ...
Art School, studying under
Abbo Ostrowsky Abbo Ostrowsky (October 23, 1889 Elizavetgrad, Russia – June 19, 1975) was an American art teacher and etcher.
Life
Ostrowsky was born in the Russian Empire.
He studied at the Odessa Art School, with Kyriak Kostandi.
In 1906, he was assistant ...
, at the same time as
Moses Soyer
Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter.
Biography
He was born as Moses Schoar and both he and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of R ...
,
Raphael Soyer
Raphael Zalman Soyer (December 25, 1899 – November 4, 1987) was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men ...
,
Adolph Gottlieb
Adolph Gottlieb (March 14, 1903 – March 4, 1974) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Early life and education
Adolph Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New Yo ...
, and
Peter Blume
Peter Blume (27 October 1906 – 30 November 1992) was an American painter and sculptor. His work contained elements of folk art, Precisionism, Parisian Purism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
Biography
Blume, born in Smarhon, Russian Empire to a ...
.
In 1926, Gross began teaching at
The Educational Alliance
Educational Alliance is a leading social institution that has been serving communities in New York City’s Lower Manhattan since 1889. It provides multi-generational programs and services in education, health and wellness, arts and culture, and ...
, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years.
Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson (September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures.
Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Kyiv Oblast, ...
was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture.
Gross began exhibiting sculpture in group shows of students at the Educational Alliance, and then at the Jewish Art Center in the Bronx. In the late 1920s and early 1930s he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
).
In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...
. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades.
In March 1932, Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends
Milton Avery
Milton Clark Avery (March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965Haskell, B. (2003). "Avery, Milton". Grove Art Online.) was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband ...
,
Moses Soyer
Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter.
Biography
He was born as Moses Schoar and both he and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of R ...
,
Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others.
Gross was primarily a practitioner of the
direct carving
This page describe terms and jargon related to sculpture and sculpting.
__NOTOC__
A
armature
:An armature is an internal frame or skeleton which supports a modelled sculpture. A typical armature for a small sculpture is made of heavy gauge ...
method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood. Other direct carvers in early 20th-century American art include
William Zorach
William Zorach (February 28, 1889 – November 15, 1966) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer. He won the Logan Medal of the arts. He is notable for being at the forefront of American artists embracing cubism, as well as for ...
,
Jose de Creeft
José Mariano de Creeft (November 27, 1884 - September 11, 1982) was a Spanish-born American artist, sculptor, and teacher known for modern sculpture in stone, metal, and wood, particularly figural works of women. His 16 ft bronze ''Alice i ...
, and
Robert Laurent
Robert Laurent (June 29, 1890 – April 20, 1970) was a French-American modernist figurative sculptor, printmaker and teacher. His work, the ''New York Times'' wrote,"figured in the development of an American sculptural art that balanced natu ...
. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings (27 sculptures) at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...
. A key work from this era, now at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...
, is the 1932 birds-eye maple ''
Acrobatic Performers'', which is also only one and one quarter inch thick. His work was also part of the
sculpture event in the
art competition at the
1932 Summer Olympics
The 1932 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the X Olympiad and also known as Los Angeles 1932) were an international multi-sport event held from July 30 to August 14, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, United States. The Games were held duri ...
.
Maturity 1933-1957
In 1933 Gross joined the government's PWAP (
Public Works of Art Project
The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a New Deal program designed to employ artists that operated from 1933 to 1934. The program was headed by Edward Bruce, under the United States Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Admin ...
), which transitioned into the WPA (
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
), which Gross worked for later in the 1930s. Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the
Federal Trade Commission Building
The Federal Trade Commission Building is a federal building which serves as the headquarters of the Federal Trade Commission. Completed in 1938, the building was designated by Congress as a contributing structure to the Pennsylvania Avenue National ...
, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the
1939 New York World's Fair
The 1939–40 New York World's Fair was a world's fair held at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York, United States. It was the second-most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchas ...
. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the
Exposition universelle de 1937
Exposition (also the French for exhibition) may refer to:
*Universal exposition or World's Fair
*Expository writing
**Exposition (narrative)
*Exposition (music)
*Trade fair
* ''Exposition'' (album), the debut album by the band Wax on Radio
*Exposi ...
in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer
Lillian Leitzel.
In 1938 filmmaker and historian
Lewis Jacobs
Lewis Jacobs (1904 – February 11, 1997) was an American screenwriter, film director and critic. He authored several books, including ''The Rise of the American Film''.
Early life
Jacobs was born in 1904 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He ...
made a 30-minute feature of Gross carving, called ''Tree Trunk to Head'', showing Gross at work in his East Village studio on a portrait of his wife Renee, who models in the film.
In 1949 Gross sketched
Chaim Weizmann
Chaim Azriel Weizmann ( he, חיים עזריאל ויצמן ', russian: Хаим Евзорович Вейцман, ''Khaim Evzorovich Veytsman''; 27 November 1874 – 9 November 1952) was a Russian-born biochemist, Zionist leader and Israel ...
, President of Israel, at several functions in New York City where Weizmann was speaking. Gross began a portrait in clay and then traveled to Israel in the summer of that year hoping to be able to meet Weizmann and have him sit for a portrait. Weizmann was too ill, but Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year. Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 (the second of many trips there in the postwar years) to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities. This series was exhibited at the
Jewish Museum (Manhattan)
The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The first Jewish museum in the Unit ...
in 1953.
''Chaim Gross, Sculptor'' by Josef Vincent Lombardo, the first major book on Gross, came out in 1949. It included a catalogue raisonne of his sculpture.
In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. At the end of the decade Gross was working primarily in bronze, which allowed him to create open forms, large-scale works and of course, multiple casts. Gross's large-scale bronze ''
The Family'', donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor
Ed Koch
Edward Irving Koch ( ; December 12, 1924February 1, 2013) was an American politician, lawyer, political commentator, film critic, and television personality. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and was may ...
, and installed at the
Bleecker Street
Bleecker Street is an east–west street in the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is most famous today as a Greenwich Village nightclub district. The street connects a neighborhood today popular for music venues and comedy, but which was ...
Park at 11th street, is now a fixture of
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...
.
Later Career 1957-1991
![Chaim Gross, sculptor, Provincetown, Massachusetts](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Chaim_Gross%2C_sculptor%2C_Provincetown%2C_Massachusetts.jpg)
In 1957, Gross published ''The Techniques of Wood Sculpture'', an influential how-to book with photographs of him at work by famed photographer
Eliot Elisofon
Eliot Elisofon (April 17, 1911 – April 7, 1973) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist.
Life
From the Lower East Side in New York City, Elisofon graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1929 and Fordham University in ...
. In 1959, a survey of Gross's sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit ''Four American Expressionists'' curated by
Lloyd Goodrich
Lloyd Goodrich (July 10, 1897March 27, 1987) was an American art historian. He wrote extensively on American artists, including Edward Hopper, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Raphael Soyer and Reginald Marsh. He was associated with the Whitney Museu ...
at the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...
, with work by
Abraham Rattner
Abraham Rattner (July 8, 1895 – February 14, 1978) was an American artist, best known for his richly colored paintings, often with religious subject matter. During World War I, he served in France with the U.S. Army as a camouflage artist.
Ear ...
,
Doris Caesar, and
Karl Knaths
Karl Knaths (October 21, 1891 – March 9, 1971) was an American artist whose personal approach to the Cubist aesthetic led him to create paintings which, while abstract, contained readily identifiable subjects. In addition to the Cubist painte ...
. In 1963, Gross and his family moved from their longtime residence at 30 W. 105th Street to
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...
, following the purchase of a four-story historic townhouse and studio at 526 LaGuardia Place. The townhouse is now the
Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation, winner of a 2015 Village Award from the
Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Village Preservation (formerly the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, or GVSHP) is a non-profit organization which advocates for the preservation of architecture and culture in several neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, New York. ...
, and open to the public.
![Chaim Gross Plaque](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Chaim_Gross_Plaque.jpg)
In 1974, the Smithsonian American Art Museum held the exhibition, ''Chaim Gross: Sculpture and Drawings'', organized by Janet A. Flint, Smithsonian Curator of Prints and Drawings. In 1976, a selection from Gross's important collection of historic African sculpture, formed since the late 1930s, was exhibited at the
Worcester Art Museum
The Worcester Art Museum, also known by its acronym WAM, houses over 38,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present day and representing cultures from all over the world. WAM opened in 1898 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and ranks among th ...
in the show ''The Sculptor's Eye: The African Art Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Chaim Gross''.
In 1977, Gross had three retrospective exhibitions: at the
Lowe Art Museum
Lowe Art Museum is the art museum of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. The museum is located on the campus of the University of Miami and is accessible by Miami Metrorail at University Station.
Lowe Art Museum's comprehensive col ...
at the University of Miami, followed by the
Montclair Art Museum
The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is located in Montclair, New Jersey, United States, a few miles west of New York City. Since it opened in 1914 as the first museum in New Jersey that granted access to the public and the first dedicated solely to a ...
; and the
Jewish Museum (Manhattan)
The Jewish Museum is an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the former Felix M. Warburg House, along Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The first Jewish museum in the Unit ...
. The Jewish Museum's exhibition catalog featured an important essay on Gross by art historian and modern American sculpture specialist Roberta K. Tarbell, Professor Emeritus at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...
.
Gross received multiple honorary doctorates in the 1970s and 80s: from
Franklin and Marshall College
Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Frankli ...
(1970);
Yeshiva University
Yeshiva University is a private Orthodox Jewish university with four campuses in New York City.["About YU]
on the Yeshiva Universit ...
(1978);
Adelphi University
Adelphi University is a private university in Garden City, New York. Adelphi also has centers in Manhattan, Hudson Valley, and Suffolk County. There is also a virtual, online campus for remote students. It is the oldest institution of higher ed ...
(1980);
Hebrew Union College
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
(1984); and
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus.
Being New York City's first publ ...
(1986). In 1979 Gross was elected into the
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...
as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981. In 1984, he was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
, with
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ...
and
Lukas Foss
Lukas Foss (August 15, 1922 – February 1, 2009) was a German-American composer, pianist, and conductor.
Career
Born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, Germany in 1922, Foss was soon recognized as a child prodigy. He began piano and theory lessons with J ...
. Gross died at Beth Israel Hospital in May 1991 and was buried at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Queens, New York. In the fall of 1991,
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
gave an important tribute to Gross at the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, music, and art. Its fixed number membership is elected for lifetime appointments. Its headqu ...
, which is published in their ''Proceedings''. In 1994,
Forum Gallery
Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to:
Common uses
* Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States
*Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city
**Roman Forum, most famous example
*Internet ...
, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work.
Teaching
Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the
Educational Alliance
Educational Alliance is a leading social institution that has been serving communities in New York City’s Lower Manhattan since 1889. It provides multi-generational programs and services in education, health and wellness, arts and culture, and c ...
and the
New School for Social Research
The New School for Social Research (NSSR) is a graduate-level educational institution that is one of the divisions of The New School in New York City, United States. The university was founded in 1919 as a home for progressive era thinkers. NSSR ...
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, as well as at the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
Art School, the
MoMA
Moma may refer to:
People
* Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist
* Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician
* Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher
Places
; Ang ...
art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School (which Gross ran briefly with
Alexander Dobkin
Alexander is a male given name. The most prominent bearer of the name is Alexander the Great, the king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedonia who created one of the largest empires in ancient history.
Variants listed here are Aleksandar, Al ...
,
Raphael Soyer
Raphael Zalman Soyer (December 25, 1899 – November 4, 1987) was a Russian-born American painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Soyer was referred to as an American scene painter. He is identified as a Social Realist because of his interest in men ...
and
Moses Soyer
Moses Soyer (December 25, 1899 – September 3, 1974) was an American social realist painter.
Biography
He was born as Moses Schoar and both he and his identical twin brother, Raphael, were born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of R ...
).
Gross was a member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the
Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. He was a founder and served as the first president of the
Sculptors Guild
Sculptors Guild, a society of sculptors who banded together to promote public interest in contemporary sculpture, was founded in 1937. Signatories to the original corporation papers (Sculptors Guild, Inc.) were Sonia Gordon Brown, Berta Margoulie ...
.
Personal life
In 1932 Gross married Renee Nechin (d. 2005), and they had two children, Yehuda and Mimi.
Mimi Gross
Mimi Gross (born 1940) is a New York City born American artist.
Biography Early life
Gross was born in New York City in 1940. She is the daughter of the sculptor Chaim Gross. She grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan among the artist commu ...
is a New York-based artist. She was married to the artist
Red Grooms
Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop art, pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic ...
from 1963-1976.
Gallery
File:Sculpture "Alaska snowshoe mail carrier," by Chaim Gross at the Ariel Rios Federal Building, Washington, D.C LCCN2013634491.jpg, ''Alaska Snowshoe Carrier'', 1936. Ariel Rios Federal Building, Washington, D. C.
File:Brooklyn Museum - Ballerina - Chaim Gross.jpg, ''Ballerina'', 1940. Brooklyn Museum.
, ''Judith'', 1960. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Notes
See also
*https://web.archive.org/web/20140620172948/http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/gross/index.html
References
* Brummé, C. Ludwig, ''Contemporary American Sculpture'', Crown Publishers, New York, 1948
* Lombardo, Josef Vincent, ''Chaim Gross: Sculptor'', Dalton House, Inc., New York, 1949
* Opitz, Glenn B, Editor, ''Mantle Fielding’s Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers'', Apollo Book, Poughkeepsie NY, 1986
External links
General
The Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gross, Chaim
1902 births
1991 deaths
People from Kolomyia
Ukrainian Jews
Jewish sculptors
Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe)
Art Students League of New York alumni
Austrian Jews
Austrian sculptors
Austrian male sculptors
Ukrainian sculptors
Ukrainian male sculptors
Austrian emigrants to the United States
American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent
Jewish American artists
20th-century American sculptors
20th-century American male artists
American male sculptors
Sculptors Guild members
Sculptors from New York (state)
Beaux-Arts Institute of Design (New York City) alumni
Olympic competitors in art competitions
20th-century American Jews
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters