For the past several weeks, a second floor gallery at the New-York Historical Society has become what the French would call a boîte à bijoux, a jewel box overflowing with concentrated gem-like images of Jewish heroes and Nazi monsters created by the Polish-Jewish illustrator Arthur Szyk (pronounced Shik).
Most of Szyk’s images were made for reproduction in books, magazines, and newspapers. To see the originals, many of which are surprisingly small opaque watercolors (or gouaches) is to be dazzled by the painter’s technique and the fact that he evidently worked without a magnifying glass.
Szyk (1894-1951) is a singular figure in 20th-century art—at once a remarkable craftsman, a political activist, a successful commercial artist, a ferocious cartoonist, and the inventor of a style closer to medieval illuminated manuscripts than any sort of contemporary expression. He was also an unabashed propagandist with a taste for patriotic pomp and sturdy muskeljuden. All dimensions can be found in Arthur Szyk: Soldier in Art at the Historical Society through Jan. 21, 2018.
Although he is best known now for his illuminated Haggadah, produced during the late 1930s, Szyk was even more celebrated during the period of WWII. Then, close to ubiquitous with his work regularly featured in national magazines, he was America’s most dogged, and perhaps most prominent, anti-fascist artist.
As befits so partisan a figure, Szyk’s current visibility is due in large measure to the enthusiasm of Irvin Unger, a former rabbi and antiquarian bookseller who not only spent years collecting Szyk material but was instrumental in organizing Soldier in Artas well as other exhibitions, including a major show of Szyk’s political work nine years ago at the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
Szyk’s politics were as boldly defined as his gouaches. He was simultaneously a Polish nationalist, a militant Zionist, and an American patriot. He opposed the Soviet Union during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-20 and again with the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, then embraced the Soviets after the 1941 German invasion (switching his allegiance from the Polish government in exile to the future People’s Poland). A close friend of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, providing illustrations for his novel Samson the Nazirite, he was a fervent supporter of Franklin Roosevelt as well as an advocate for Jabotinsky’s successor, Peter Bergson.