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About Simka Simkhovitch
Born near Kiev in 1893, Simka Simkhovitch enrolled in the art school at Odessa, then he transferred to the Royal Academy in St. Petersburg. After graduation in 1918, he began teaching. During the early 1920s, Simkhovitch experimented with the Constructivist style in set designs. For unknown reasons, the painter came to New York in 1924 where he had to work as an illustrator. His paintings began to draw attention a few years later. At the Sterner Gallery and Hackett Gallery he was given one-man shows. Simkhovitch married a young model of Swedish descent, started a family, and moved to Connecticut. He exhibited widely in national shows (too numerous to list here), further solo exhibitions, and his paintings hang in St. Petersburg, Cracow, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Worcester Art Museum (Purchase Prize), the New Britain Museum of American Art, and in many private collections. The Art Institute of Chicago gave him the Waite Harris Bronze Medal in 1932. Many admire his portraits of children. Simkhovitch was active in the American Scene and regionalist movement of the 1930s, completing mural commissions in the Jackson, Mississippi Court House (1938) and the Post Office in Beaufort, North Carolina (1940).
Simkhovitch characterized his own painting as cheerful in subject matter, and optimistic. During his last few years he turned again to a Cubist abstraction but then died after an illness. The Picnic came at the painter’s height, and could be considered his masterpiece. It was described in the Christian Science Monitor (3 December 1935): The manner in which the artist has assembled the factors in the painting is interesting. He has dwelt upon the planes, so that the bulk of the forms is emphasized; one apprehends the sculptural qualities of every detail, even the fruit and the pitcher. The figures are brought into a composition so that, together they provide a unity of design. The small boats and the buildings across the river carry on the design to the border of the picture. Harmony is maintained because the same tones, the same plane emphasis, the same rhythm, all continue throughout the composition.
The composition is indeed admirable with its gentle pyramid of figures; the strip of land in the distance is like an extended cubist still-life of trees and miniature buildings. Equally outstanding are the soft modeling of the figures and the superb draftsmanship, emphasized by accentuated contours. The broken color in the reflections in the river is a remnant from impressionism that adds to the holiday atmosphere. There is a certain classicism in the parallel arrangement of figures, while the seated man with his back to us, a superb male figure study, recalls several images of river gods in Roman and later European art. The other more homely figures remind us these are ordinary people in 1930s America, suffering under the Depression but enjoying a humble lunch on their day off. The reviewer above pointed out how this still-life was a sculpturally conceived composition. In fact, it distantly evokes Cézanne. |
Paintings by Simka Simkhovitch
| Delilah with Flowers |
| oil on canvasboard: 8 x 6 inches |
| signed and dated 1934: lower left |
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| The Picnic |
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oil on canvas: 44 x 50 inches |
| signed: lower center/right |
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