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Nahum Tschacbasov (1899 - 1984)

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Nahum Tschacbasov (1899 - 1984) ARTIST BIO Nahum Tschacbasov (1899 - 1984) From AskArt.com, the following has been provided by Leonard Barton, the artists’ stepson: 1899 Nahum Tschacbasov, the second oldest of nine children, is born in Baku, a town on the Caspian Sea, in Azerbaijan, Russia. 1905 His father, Stephan, emigrates from Russia, settles in Chicago, and starts a printing business using a new family name, Licterman. 1907 Tschacbasov, with his mother Sophie and brothers and sisters, joins his father in Chicago just as the finan- cial crash causes the failure of his father’s business. Tschacbasov grows up in the Chicago slums. 1913 He leaves school at the age of thirteen and takes a succession of jobs to help support the family. He attends night school for one year, studying electrical engineering. 1918 He enlists in the Navy and serves as an electrician at Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland. The light of the North Sea impresses him greatly. “Nothing could compare with the Scapa Flow. My feeling for color in my work has drawn from this palette of the Northern Skies. The color in the North made me lose my deep feeling of depression.” 1919-29 Returning to night school for three years, he earns a degree in business. Becoming an accountant and later an efficiency expert, he eventually forms his own successful business. He marries Esther Liss, who bears two children before the marriage ends in divorce. 1929 Tschacbasov marries Esther Sorokin. During this time, he has a deepening interest in drawing and painting, which he has taken up in response to pressures of work and life. His first encounters with modern art are the works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Rouault. 1931 Esther gives birth to his daughter Sondra, the subject of many of his paintings. 1932-33 Tschacbasov moves for a short time to New York City in order to be in a modern art center and then to Paris, where he adopts the name Tschacbasov, an anagram of different family names. He studies with Leop- old Gottlieb for eight months, then with Marcel Gromaire, who teaches him pictorial structure, and briefly with Fernand Leger. Working in his studio on the edge of Montmartre and later in the Hotel de Sante in Montparnasse, he produces a large body of work, retaining fifty paintings. After trips to North Africa, Spain, and the Balearic Islands, he travels often from Paris to New York City, where he spends six months painting a series of Depression-inspired pictures after finding that his American business has gone bankrupt in his absence. 1934 In Paris, Galerie Zak exhibits landscapes from his trip to Majorca in the first one-man exhibition of Tschacbasov paintings; Salon de Tuileries also exhibits his work. His savings exhausted, he returns to New York via Tunisia in the midst of the Depression. 1935 Living on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, Tschacbasov works on the WPA Federal Arts Project, Easel Division, where he meets other artists and becomes politically involved. His works are shown at Galerie Secession with those of Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and other modernist and expressionist painters. Tschacbasov, Rothko, Gottlieb, Joseph Solman and others from Galerie Secession form a group called The Ten combining common aims of social consciousness with an expressionist and abstract style. Themes of social injustice are more dominant in Tschacbasov’s work than in that of others of The Ten, as he draws on his own childhood experiences of the harsh realities of immigrant life in industrial Chicago. In the summer, a one-man exhibition of his non-objective paintings is held at Galerie Secession, and in Decem- ber, Montross Gallery in New York City holds the first exhibition of The Ten, including two works by Tschacba- sov, “Handout” and “Three Graces.” 1936 In January, an exhibition of The Ten is held at Municipal Art Galleries in New York City, and later in the fall an exhibition, also of The Ten, is held at Galerie Bonaparte in Paris. Tschacbasov, now living at 9 Willow Street in Brooklyn, participates during February as a member of the Nation- al Executive Committee in the first meeting of the American Artists, Congress, an organization for the promo- tion of government subsidies for artists. 1936-43 He has five one-man exhibitions at ACA Gallery in New York City and participates in five group exhibi- tions. His paintings which focus on themes of social satire during this period include “Thanksgiving”, “Supreme Court”, and “Little Red Schoolhouse”. 1936-38 Among the paintings exhibited in the “Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art are Tschacbasov’s “Deportation”, “Clinic”, “Friday Night”, “Harbor Sunset”, and “The Matriarch”. 1936-37 Tschacbasov is appointed business manager of Art Front Magazine, a publication associated with the Artists’ Union and focusing on both aesthetic issues and economic reforms of benefit to artists. He withdraws from The Ten as a result of disagreements arising from his desire to promote the group on a plat- form of social criticism. 1937 Tschacbasov is now living at 1 West 21st Street in Manhattan. 1938-39 He moves to 31 East 21st Street. 1939 His circle of friends at this time include Philip Evergood, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, David Burliuk, Wil- liam Gropper, the Soyer brothers, Robert Gwathmey, Marsden Hartley, and Max Weber. Due to cut-backs in WPA funding, he teaches at his 38 West 22nd Street studio and at the American Artists’ School. On the faculty are David Burliuk and the Soyer brothers, as well as Elaine de Kooning and other artists with similar aesthetic and social points of view. Personal and artistic crises lead to his entering into Jungian psychoanalysis, which provides new impetus and di- rection to his painting. Under the influence of analysis, he starts to write portions of a surrealistic autobiography, The Moon is My Uncle. His paintings, “Refugees” and “Friday Night” are shown with works by Avery, Burliuk, and DeHirsh Margules in a group exhibition at Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. In September, the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts focuses on themes of social criticism in an exhibition entitled “The World Today”, curated by Elizabeth McCausland, which includes Tschacbasov’s, “Little Red School House”. 1940 Tschacbasov takes up photography. Photographing the works of friends and other artists, he builds a collection of color slides which serves as a foundation for the American Library Color Slide Company, an archives which continues to be of service in art history education. His painting, “Portrait of Sondra” is exhibited in the “Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings” with works by the Soyer brothers, John Sloan, and others at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. 1941 Tschacbasov exhibits at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia. 1942 Now living at 1 Christopher Street in New York City and painting in his studio at 30 East 14th Street, Tschacbasov participates in “Artists for Victory”, an exhibition of contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhibiting his painting “Deportation”. 1943 Tschacbasov’s painting style changes from social criticism to themes that are personal and symbolic, lead- ing to a break with the ACA Gallery. He spends part of the year living and working in Oklahoma City, where nature and the landscapes of Oklahoma serve as subjects for his painting. In the 54th Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture held at the Art Institute of Chicago, his painting, “Deportation” is exhibited. He re-locates his studio and residence to the Chelsea Hotel, a West 23rd Street haven for artists, where he re- mains throughout the rest of his life. 1944 Tschacbasov works at Stanley William Hayter’s printmaking workshop, Atelier 17, a center for surreal- ist ideas. He adopts the principle espoused by Hayter of automatism in which one, following the flow of a line, would be led to mythical images which he could then shape. Tschacbasov finds that an inner world of images and symbols of the unconscious opens up to him. This new affirmative mood of his painting, expressing the surrealist view of the “strangeness of reality” is well received by the public and critics. 1944 Tschacbasov exhibits in the spring at the Cincinnati Museum in Ohio. His painting, “Garden of Eden”, is included in another exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Rich- mond along with paintings by Joseph Stella, Max Weber, and the Soyer brothers. In the summer, he exhibits at the 55th Annual Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. in the fall as well as at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, where his painting, “Lady with Mirror” is included. In December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City acquires his painting, “Deportation”. A one-man exhibition of his works is held at the Arts and Crafts Club in New Orleans. 1945-46 Children’s Holiday Circus of Modern Art, at Museum of Modern Art, December 4, 1945-January 6, 1946. Works sent by Perls Galleries. “The Aquarium,” “Little Girls’ Wonderland” 1944-48 Tschacbasov has four one-man exhibitions at Perls Gallery in New York City and participates in three group exhibitions. 1945 His painting, “The Admiral” is exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago. Critic Harriet Loveman chooses his painting, “Sondra and the Solar System” for “The Critics’ Choice of Contem- porary American Painting” exhibition held at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania exhibits his painting, “The Amber Necklace”. 1945-51 While teaching at the Art Students’ League, his surrealist approach and encouragement of freedom of expression exert a strong influence on students and other painters.
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