Esphyr slobodkina biography examples
Esphyr Slobodkina
During the period of social and political turmoil that followed the Russian Revolution, Esphyr Slobodkina fled with her family to Vladivostok, and then to Harbin, Manchuria. In , she immigrated to New York and the following year entered the National Academy of Design. Although unenthusiastic about the curriculum, Slobodkina's visa required that she attend school, and she remained at the Academy until It was fortunate that she did, because through his sister, also a student, she met Ilya Bolotowsky, whom she married in
Slobodkina remembers her first long conversation with Bolotowsky as a lecture on composition, in which Bolotowsky talked of organization, mass, form, color, space—heady new ideas despite her several years of academic training.
Through Bolotowsky, Slobodkina met Byron Browne, Gertrude and Balcomb Greene, Giorgio Cavallon, and others whose conversations roamed from discussions of the cost of canvas to the "latest capers in Picasso's procession of quickly changing styles."(1)
Slobodkina still considered herself very much a student when she married Bolotowsky, but, by signing her name to several of his early paintings, he wangled invitations for both of them to go to Yaddo, an artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Still wavering between the Impressionist theories she had learned earlier, and Bolotowsky's modernist ideas (he had not yet ventured into pure abstraction), she painted expressionist still-life and interior scenes during the several months they spent in Saratoga Springs. Her first Cubist-inspired painting—a fractured image of the sink in her bathroom—was created in Without rejecting more expressionist landscape and still-life paintings, she began in the winter of –37 to concentrate seriously on abstraction.
Once begun, Slobodkina moved quickly through her Cubist experiments toward a concern with planes and flattened pictorial space.
Financial pressures in the s made it difficult for Slobodkina to concentrate on painting. Her parents had come to New York, but the family's economic situation was precarious. During the early s she and her mother opened a dressmaking business, designing and creating fine clothing and millinery.
Esphyr slobodkina biography examples Article Talk. She would frequently use wooden shapes, wire, and glass to create witty constructions such as The Sadly Sagging Educational Sprial Later, Ms. October -SeptemberAmong other short-lived jobs, Slobodkina worked for several textile printing firms, each of which folded. Although her parents still needed her help, her own situation dramatically changed when Bolotowsky joined the Public Works of Art Project and later the WPA: "It gave us bread, it gave us time, and above all, it gave us peace of mind."(2) When Slobodkina and Bolotowsky separated in , Slobodkina went on relief, and then joined the WPA herself.
She became very active in the Artists' Union, and when members were asked to make posters for a fundraising event, Slobodkina presented collages.
More at ease with scissors and paper than with drawing, Slobodkina's collages honed her developing abstract style. She did several constructions early in her career, three-dimensional assemblages of wood, wire, and other found objects, and experimented with found-object sculpture.
In her paintings of the late s, forms are often flattened and overlaid in spatial configurations associated with collage. She also began experimenting with gesso panels, finding the evenly sanded surfaces especially suited to the linear clarity of her forms.
Slobodkina joined the American Abstract Artists early in the organization's history.
She had not attended the preliminary meetings at Ibram Lassaw's studio in , but once a member, served the organization in various capacities for several decades. During the early s, with Alice Trumbull Mason, she helped organize an ambitious program of cultural evenings that combined lectures and parties.
Esphyr slobodkina biography examples for kids Biography [ edit ]. Bookology and local booksellers receive a small commission for each book sold. Everything gets used in this house. Slobodkina was a celebrated avant garde artist and feminist in the middle part of the 20th century.In her role as hospitality chairman, she introduced socially prominent New Yorkers to the organization.
A change in the direction of her career came in , when Slobodkina first met Margaret Wise Brown, a noted author of children's books. Hoping to find illustration work, she wrote and illustrated a children's story to present as an introductory "portfolio".
Still not confident of her ability as a draftsman, Slobodkina cut little figures out of paper and collaged them to make her designs. Brown was charmed by their directness and simplicity and asked Slobodkina to illustrate Brown's book The Little Fireman, published the following year. This was the first of many children's tales that Slobodkina was to illustrate, and soon she began writing her own stories as well.
Caps for Sale, her best-known book, has become a classic.
By the mid s, Slobodkina had matured as an artist—Albert Gallatin owned two of her paintings, and she was invited to exhibit in the influential "Eight By Eight" exhibition of American abstract art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in With technical problems well in hand, she developed compositions such as Crossroad #2 and Spring #3, in which she juxtaposed planar shapes to create subtly modulated movement.
Often abstractions from objects, the paintings of these years are well-harmonized arrangements of color and form. Her exuberance and energy continued to surface in collages—As Indicated, for example—and she expressed her irrepressible wit in found object sculpture, and jewelry made of old typewriter parts.
Inrecognition of her own accomplishment and creative potential, Slobodkina was invited back to Yaddo in , and the following year she went twice to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Since then she has exhibited frequently, and her little books continue to delight children the world over.
1. Esphyr Slobodkina, Notes for a Biographer (privately printed, Urquhart-Slobodkina, ), p.
The three volumes of Slobodkina's Notes are a detailed reminiscence of her life, career, family, and friends.
Short biography examples Lived in Clifton with family during the week and visited her husband on weekends. Montgomery, L. Along with Ilya, Slobodkina was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, which began amid controversy in Used everyday office materials, such as bills and stamps, to create several collages including Crossroads and The Spangles.2. Esphyr Slobodkina, Notes for a Biographer (privately printed, Urquhart-Slobodkina, ), p.
3. Other exhibitors were George L. K. Morris, Ilya Bolotowsky, Suzy Frelinghuysen, A.E. Gallatin, Alice Trumbull Mason, Ad Reinhardt, and Charles Shaw.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction – (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, )