Eugene Chodorow (1910-2000) Ukranian/American, Signed Serigraph. Depicts a woman in a robe and sandals with his name vertically bottom left and a faded hanging tapestry upper left. Signed and dated '87 bottom right. Original label attached to back. 

Overall: 42 X 24 in. 

Sight: 32 X 13 1/2 in. 

#3809 . 

Eugene Chodorow was born in Medzhybizh, Ukraine on March 15th, 1910. His childhood was spent on the coast of the Black Sea, where the strategic location of his village made it a natural stopping point for people escaping pogroms and artists heading into Odessa. He had no formal education, and made money by assisting artists, cleaning their brushes and carrying their easels. Several gave him various tools, paints, and canvases as payment, too, and he began to try painting himself, soon producing rudimentary watercolors. In 1927 he emigrated to the United States, where he worked many odd jobs in New York City while studying at the Educational Alliance. In the early 1930s Chodorow became one of five artists to work with Anton Refregier, a Russian immigrant who was in charge of creating murals under the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Their primary work, a massive mural for the Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn, was visible to the public up until the mid 2010s when the facility faced closure. Along with another muralist named August “Gus” Henkel he painted a mural about the history of aviation for Floyd Bennett Field, with each of them making two panels. However, a New York Times article on July 7th, 1940 accused them of incorporating Communist propaganda into their works, based on a red star visible on an airplane and a figure that supposedly resembled Stalin, as well as the artists’ pacifistic viewpoints. Although the accusations were retracted by the paper later, the mural was destroyed after only being publicly visible for one week, with just photographs documenting their work surviving. Chodorow enlisted in the Marines during World War II and worked as a combat artist. He painted two murals for an auditorium at the Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton in the late 1940s, one of which showed a beach landing on an island in the Pacific Ocean. During his military service Chodorow became close friends with Evans Fordyce Carlson, a Marine Corp General and leader of the legendary “Carlson’s Raiders.” Carlson suggested that Chodorow study in Europe when the war ended, and in 1946 Chodorow used the G.I. Bill to travel to Paris. He studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine, and learned lost wax casting techniques. When he came back to America he and his wife settled in Fairfax near San Francisco, where immersed himself in the growing Marin County art scene. His sculptures in the 1950s and 1960s can be found in museums and parks along the West Coast, and in the 1970s he became interested in lithography, eventually developing his own method of creating high quality serigraphs which can be found in many public and private collections. He died on October 2nd, 2000, leaving behind a lasting legacy of art influenced by his many travels and the evolving Americana of the 20th Century.