Seymour Rosofsky

Seymour Rosofsky was an American artist, who has been described as one of the key figures in twentieth-century Chicago art. He emerged in the late 1940s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1949; MFA, 1951), one of several G.I. Bill veterans, including Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli and H. C. Westermann, who would join Don Baum, Dominick Di Meo, June Leaf, and Nancy Spero to form the influential movement later dubbed the "Monster Roster" by critic Franz Schulze, which was a precursor to the more well-known Chicago Imagists. Like others in the group, Rosofsky was drawn to the unsettling, macabre side of Surrealism, initially creating gestural, expressionist renderings of grotesque, existentially angst-ridden figures in isolated or uncomfortable situations, that gave way in the 1960s to more fantastical, observational paintings that examined power, politics and domestic relationships in an unflinching way.

Rosofsky was recognized for his deftness as a painter, his interest in drawing as a process and medium, and as a caricaturist. His work was exhibited in numerous Art Institute of Chicago "Chicago and Vicinity" shows, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago survey "Art in Chicago: 1945-1995," the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a retrospective at the Krannert Art Museum (1984). He was also featured in the Franz Schulze's book Fantastic Images (1972) and Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago (2016). His work can be found in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

Rosofsky was born to Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants on the West Side of Chicago in 1924. He painted from an young age and took weekend classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) as a young teen. After he enrolled there, his studies were interrupted by military service in the Army during World War II from 1943-6; he completed his BFA in 1949 and an MFA in 1951, while also taking humanities courses at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. At SAIC, Rosofsky studied oil painting with the Russian-born artist Boris Anisfeld, a former student of Marc Chagall, whose disciplined, academic teaching instilled in him an appreciation for art history and classical painting skills. He exhibited in the seminal, student-driven Momentum Exhibitions of 1948-1950, organized in protest over the exclusion of students from the Art Institute's prestigious "Chicago and Vicinity" shows. He was also featured, along with Campoli, Golub, and Theodore Halkin in the Art Institute's "Veteran's Exhibition" of 1948. In 1958, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to go to Rome; in 1962, a Guggenheim Foundation grant took him and his family to Paris.

Rosofsky was part of the loose group of artists dubbed the "Monster Roster," which attracted a degree of international attention in the 1950s as a "Chicago School" He was part of a 1956 show at Beloit College curated by Allan Frumkin that brought the group into focus, and the later shows, "The New Chicago Decade: 1950-1960" (Lake Forest College, 1959) and "Haut artistes de Chicago" (Paris, 1962). Throughout his career, Rosofsky was associated with Chicago's more international galleries, such as Richard Feigen, Richard Gray, and B. C. Holland. Rosofsky's work has continued to be shown since his death in museums, galleries and public spaces. In 2011, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chose Rosofsky's striking but grim Unemployment Agency (1957-8) from the Art Institute's collection to hang on the wall behind his desk at City Hall.

Rosofsky taught at Chicago Loop College (later Harold Washington College) from 1964 until his death from a heart attack in 1981. He has been cited by many artists, including Phyllis Bramson and William Conger, as an influence.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023