Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981) American, Signed Original Lithograph. Title: "Coffee." Depicts a woman in thigh high stockings sitting in a comfy chair reading a newspaper, with a cup of coffee near her feet. Signed in pencil bottom right. Label on back with title, information about the piece, and a brief biography of the artist. 

Overall Size: 19 3/4 x 16 in. 

Sight Size: 16 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. 

Joseph Hirsch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 25th, 1910. He attended the School of Industrial Art between 1928 and 1931 and went to New York in 1932 to study with George Luks. He became a highly regarded painter, muralist, illustrator, and printmaker, and worked as pictorial war correspondent during World War II, during which he made seventy-five paintings and drawings of combat and soldier life in the South Pacific, Africa, and Italy. His social realist and humanist images ranged from more naturalistic to highly expressive, as he embraced multiple forms, schools, and techniques, and as a founding member of Artists Equity he was denounced as a Communist sympathizer in the McCarthy hearings. He fled to Europe until 1955, and upon returning to America after the end of the paranoia there he was eventually “rediscovered” by artists and historians, even elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1967. He died in New York City on September 21st, 1981, having won Guggenheim Fellowships, Carnegie Prizes, and Fulbright Fellowships that allowed him to make an indelible mark on American illustrative art throughout the 20th Century. 

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