Hugo Gellert
Encyclopedia
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
illustrator and muralist. A committed radical
Political radicalism
The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...
, much of Gellert's work is agitational in nature and distinctive in style, considered by some art critics as among the best political work of the first half of the 20th Century.
Early years
Hugo Gellert (GellértGellert
Gellért represents three unrelated but interchangeable first names shared by several people and places:-Hungarian:The Hungarian first name "Gellért" is a variant of the English name Gerard, from the elements ger-, "spear", and -ard, "strong".* Hugo Gellert ,...
Hugó in the Hungarian style) was born May 3, 1892 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1906, the family emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, where they put down roots.
Gellert studied at the Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
and the National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
.
His wife was named Livia.
Art and politics
Gellert, a committed socialist who later joined the Communist Party of America considered his politics inseparable from his art. He had said that "Being an artist and being a communist are one and the same." He used his art to advance his ideals for the common people, and much of his art depicted what he saw as the injustices of racial divides and capitalism. Often his works were captured with slogans that helped further the illustration. The Working Day, for example shows a black laborer standing back to back with a white miner, and is accompanied by a phrase from Karl MarxKarl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
’s Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, "Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded."
Art as politics
Opposed to World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, Gellert published his first anti-war art in 1916. His work was prominently featured both in the illustrated magazine of the Hungarian Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
, Előre (Forward) as well as Max Eastman's
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
radical
Political radicalism
The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...
monthly magazine The Masses
The Masses
The Masses was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the U.S. from 1911 until 1917, when Federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later The New Masses...
from this time. He also created numerous illustrations for Eastman's successor magazine, The Liberator, as well as sundry publications of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
after its formation, such as The Workers Monthly and The New Masses
The New Masses
The "New Masses" was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Walt Carmon, briefly by Whittaker Chambers, and primarily by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Joseph Freeman....
. Later, he was offered a position as a staff artist for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine. In 1925, he moved to the New York Times.
In 1927, Gellert was appointed the leader of the Anti-Horthy League, the first American anti-fascist organization. In this capacity, he organized a demonstration against U.S. president Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States . A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state...
, and both he and his wife were arrested while picketing the White House.
In 1932, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York City, feeling uncomfortable about Gellert’s public persona and politics, petitioned to have Gellert’s work removed from its collection. However, they were forced to reconsider when other artists, many of whom did not share Gellert’s social idealism, came to his defense as fellow artists and threatened to withdraw their own works.
In 1939, Gellert helped organize the group, “Artists for Defense” and he later became the Chairman for “Artists for Victory”, an organization that included over 10,000 members.
Death and legacy
Freehold Township, New Jersey
Freehold Township is a Township in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the township population was 36,184. Freehold Township was first formed on October 31, 1693, and was incorporated as a township by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on February 21,...
on December 9, 1985.
Gellert's social commentary, his work and his beliefs have placed him among the greatest American social artists of the Art Deco era according to experts in the field.
His brother Lawrence
Lawrence Gellert
Lawrence Gellert, born September 14, 1898 in Budapest, Hungary, died 1979 , was a music collector who in the 1920s and 1930s documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States...
was a music collector who in the 1930s documented black protest traditions in the South of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
Although remember for his art in print, Gellert also painted a number of public murals and frescoes. Among the surviving frescoes is the series that adorn the front entryways of each of the four buildings of the Seward Park Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative
Housing cooperative
A housing cooperative is a legal entity—usually a corporation—that owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings. Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit, sometimes subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. ...
with 1728 apartments, designed and built by Herman Jessor
Herman Jessor
Herman J. Jessor was an American architect who helped build more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing in New York City. He, along with Abraham Kazan, was a driving force of the cooperative housing movement in the United States....
as part of the social housing cooperatives built by the Abraham Kazan and the United Housing Foundation
United Housing Foundation
The United Housing Foundation is a real estate investment trust in New York that is best known for constructing Rochdale Village.- Purpose :...
,. In 2003, the series became the topic of controversy after the cooperative converted from its limited equity status to a fully private and market-rate residential co-op. The cooperative attempted to remove or destroy the four giant Gellert murals. The Co-op board felt the socialist-style
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
paintings were no longer representative of the people or the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
neighborhood
Public protests and letter writing, inspired threats of legal action and other possible setbacks, caused the plan to be delayed. Gellert’s artwork can still be seen in each of the buildings.
Publications
- The Mirrors of Wall Street. Text by Anonymous, drawings by Gellert. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1933.
- Karl Marx' Capital in Lithographs. New York: R. Long and R.R. Smith, 1934.
- Comrade Gulliver: An Illustrated Account of Travel into that Strange Country the United States of America. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1935.
- “Aesop Said So”. New York: Covici Friede, 1936.
External links
- Overview of Hugo Gellert's life and work, GraphicWitness.org
- Hugo Gellert's Seward Park Murals. History and index page showing photographs of the four Seward Park murals. Retrieved October 1, 2009
- The Hugo Gellert Papers Online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Comrades in Art: Hugo Gellert