Description:

Aaron Goodelman
New York / Russian Federation, (1890 - 1978)
reclining nude, 1924
bronze
Signed and dated.


Biography from the Archives of askART: Aaron Goodelman (1890 – 1978) was an American sculptor. He graduated from art school in Odessa, but fled Eastern Europe because of antisemitic violence and immigrated to the United States in 1904. He attended a number of important art schools in New York and Paris, and at the outbreak of World War I returned to New York and became a sculptor there. He joined the Communist Party, and took part in an important exhibition denouncing the lynching of African Americans. After World War II, he turned to art related to the Holocaust and taught at CUNY.

Aaron J. Goodelman was born in Ataki, now Otaci, in what was then Bessarabia, now Moldova, and graduated from an art school in Odessa, in the Ukraine. Threatened by pogroms, he immigrated to the US, to New York City. He attended the Cooper Union* and then the National Academy of Design*, and was in Paris by 1914, studying at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts* de Paris with French sculptor Jean Antoine Injalbert, but when World War I broke out he had to return to the US.

To support himself during the 1920s he worked as a machinist, and became a communist (he joined the Communist party, the Yiddish branch), using his art to express his thoughts about the economic and social conditions of the time. By the early 1930s he showed his work at the John Reed Club; he also participated in one of the 1935 New York anti-lynching exhibitions, with a statue that denounced the racism and the violent lynchings of African Americans in the US.

For the YKUF, the (Communist) Jewish Culture Association, he was an art editor, and he co-founded the Society of American Sculptors. Besides sculpture in various materials, he did illustrations for children's books. He turned to art inspired by the Holocaust after World War II, and in the 1960s taught at the City University of New York. He died in New York City in 1978. He was interred at New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon, New York.

Sculptures, in both wood and stone, by Goodelman can be found in the collections of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hebrew Union College, the Skirball Museum, the Mishkan Museum of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum, and the Habima Theater. The Judah L. Magnes Museum held his only museum retrospective exhibition in 1965.

Goodelman provided the illustrations for Leon Elbe's book Yingele ringele and the second (1922) cover design for the Workmen's Circle's children's magazine Kinderland. The latter is a girl astride a disproportionately large goat, echoing the girl on a swing that Goodelman had previously used for the first cover of Kinder zhurnal. The goat's hind leg and tail form the letter kuf, the first (Hebrew) letter of the word "Kinderland". Whilst the goat's features are detailed, the girl is shown only in silhouette.

He also illustrated Joseph Gaer's 1929 The burning bush.

Source:
Wikipedia, 2021

  • Dimensions: 7"H x 16"W x 5"D
  • Medium: bronze

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