Joseph Hirsch
http://www.usbr.gov/museumproperty/art/biohirsc.html 3-23-2011
Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981)
Born in Philadelphia in 1910, Joseph Hirsch began his study of art at the Philadelphia Museum when he was seventeen. He also studied privately with Henry Hensche in Provincetown and George Luks in New York City. In addition to formal study, Hirsch traveled extensively, including a five year stay in France. He participated in the WPA in the easel painting division, with occasional work in the mural division, where he painted murals in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the Municipal Court. During WWII, Joseph Hirsch took part in the war effort as an artist war correspondent, recording significant battles and events. He taught at the Chicago Art Institute, the American Art School, University of Utah and had a significant tenure at the Art Students League in New York. He also won many awards, among them were a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Walter Lippincott Prize, First Prize at the New York World's Fair (1939), the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1942, 1943), and the Fulbright Fellowship (1949).
Early in his career, Joseph Hirsch was introduced to the movement of Social Realism through George Luks, who was one of "The Eight". This group of painters, at the beginning of the century, chose to depict ordinary and everyday scenes. From this movement stemmed the Social Realism genre of the 1920's and 1930's. Particularly during the Great Depression, social consciousness and commentary were important components of the movement, dictating subject matter. Social commentary was the backbone for the majority of Joseph Hirsch's paintings.
Although Social Realist painters often used specific themes, there wasn't a specific style that all of the painters followed (except realism). In his mature period, the 1960's and 1970's (the time period of the paintings he did for the Bureau of Reclamation), Hirsch used a series of layered planes to compose the painting. Often, there are a series of two-dimensional zones in which the figures reside. Typically these planes are frontally oriented towards the viewer of the painting. Depth is suggested by layering of planes and the figures contained within, rather than through perspective. These paintings appear to be snapshots, capturing people in mid-action, not posing. While Hirsch's paintings are social commentary, he was careful that the viewer had to figure out the message. There are a multitude of readings, depending on the viewer.
The paintings that Hirsch did for the Bureau of Reclamation are less obviously Social Realism. He appears to have been fascinated with the workman and his machinery, which fits into the manner of his chosen genre. Still, the emphasis in the Construction at Soldier Creek series is more on the machinery than the operators of the machinery. This interest in the technology and machinery of building is often associated with Charles Sheeler in particular. However, the paintings of Joseph Hirsch are in no way as precise and mechanical as those of Sheeler. Instead, there is a sense of whimsy and play in his paintings. The machines could be read as children's toys, and this sense is augmented by his use of bright colors, especially the complementary colors yellow and purple. The lack of other equipment and activity further reinforces the toy feeling. These paintings are exuberant, celebrating construction and the workers.
http://www.history.navy.mil/ac/artist/h/hirsch/hirsch1.htm 3-23-2011
NAVY ART COLLECTION
DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060
Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981)
Joseph Hirsch was born in 1910 in Philadelphia. He began his formal art training at 17, when he won a four-year scholarship from the city of Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. Later he studied in New York City with George Luks, who was a member of "The Eight," a group of American painters who rejected modernism in favor of depicting scenes of ordinary people and everyday life. Throughout his life, Hirsch's subjects focused on social commentary.
During the 1930's Hirsch's art career received a boost through employment by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Philadelphia. He completed murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Building and the Municipal Court. During this period he also bought an etching press and tried his hand at printmaking. Though prints could reach a wider audience, he quickly gave up etching in favor of painting. During the rest of career, however, he frequently produced lithographs of his painted works.
Along with other members of the Associated American Artists, during World War II, Hirsch worked for Abbott Laboratories, producing artworks to illustrate the war effort. His first work was the most widely produced war bond poster, Till We Meet Again. Continuing his style of capturing ordinary people and moments, he worked with fellow artist Georges Schreiber at the Pensacola Naval Air Station documenting Naval aviation training. From there he went to the South Pacific at the request of Admiral Ross McIntyre, Surgeon General of the Navy, to document the efforts of Navy medicine. Later he covered the Italian front and operations in North Africa for the Army. Those works currently belong to the U.S. Army Art Collection.
After the war, Hirsch continued his successful career. He sold his paintings through New York galleries, worked on commissions for corporations, and executed special projects such as designs for playbills. He also taught at the Chicago Art Institute, the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York City, where he taught at the time of his death in 1981. During his lifetime, Joseph Hirsch won every major award offered for American artists.
There are 32 works of Joseph Hirsch in the Navy Art Collection and all of them are online
Works of Joseph Hirsch are also in the permanent collections of these institutions:
Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA
Butler Institute of Fine Art, Youngstown OH
Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC
Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas TX
Library of Congress, Washington DC
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia PA
Truman Library, Independence MO
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Army Center of Military History, Washington DC
---------------------
Sources:
Web site of Mid America Fine Arts
Askart.com
Joseph Hirsch was a painter, muralist, illustrator, and printmaker who was born and educated in Philadelphia. He attended the School of Industrial Art between 1928 and 1931, and in 1932, went to New York to study with George Lucas.
He completed several murals in Philadelphia including "Football," "Integration," "Beginnings of Early Unionism," and "Adoption." As a pictorial war correspondent, Hirsch made about seventy-five paintings and drawings between 1943 and 1944 in the South Pacific, Africa, and Italy.
Hirsch once said that he wanted his work to reveal his beliefs but never turned to propaganda, as so many artists of his time. He did, however portray people as heroes in a deeply humanistic, positive manner, using an almost caricature-like exaggeration, especially in early canvasses such as "Two Men."
With classic techniques, he explored prosaic subject matter ranging in theme from washing windows to leading invocations, sometimes with mocking overtones. He has also represented various generalized kinds of human action through the use of monumental human forms.
Joseph Hirsch first won recognition in the 1930's with his social realist WPA murals. He has described his work "charting the labyrinths of our social conscience."
Hirsch worked in various media throughout his career and was lauded for his use of color, but it is in his many lithographs that his strong sense of composition and talent as a draftsman are most obvious.
The son of a prominent Philadelphia surgeon and patron of the musical arts, Hirsch had the opportunity to work as an artist from an early age, receiving his first recognition at age sixteen. The intellectual atmosphere of his household during the Depression years encouraged his interest in the American labor movement and its underlying theme of brotherhood.
As he matured as an artist, Hirsch developed a keen sense of society's injustices. In his works he promoted the cause of labor unions by depicting the dignity of the worker and the possibility of brotherhood by painting blacks and whites together, as in BANQUET. He also showed society's monstrous insensitivity, frightening scenes of alienation and corruption, and portrayed the ordinary person sympathetically. These underlying moral themes in Hirsch's work make it attractive beyond its skillfully executed formal elements. As Hirsch observes, "Wonderful arrangements of color and form are not enough for me. The final ingredient must be the human animal."