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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/25683/full/25683/well-deserved-biography-on-cartoonist-arthur-szyk/ <br /><br /> <b>Well-deserved biography on cartoonist Arthur Szyk</b> <br /> Friday, April 15, 2005 | by <p>stephen mark dobbs </p> <br /><br /><p>Editorial cartoonist Arthur Szyk considered his work to be “weapons of war.” He was widely known as the “Citizen Soldier of the Free World.”<br /><br /> His biting satires of fascist leaders so outraged them that Hitler once put a price on Szyk’s head. The artist revealed the ugliness and corruption of the Nazis with a harshness comparable to the political satire of Goya and Daumier.<br /><br /> Auburn University professor Joseph P. Ansell has written a marvelous and well-deserved biography about the cartoonist: “Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole.”<br /><br /> Born in Poland in 1894, Szyk took a bead on Hitler as early as 1933 and remained a personal nemesis of the German dictator — and of Mussolini and Tojo — throughout the war. Szyk’s cartoons and drawings were ubiquitous, appearing in the nation’s leading newspapers and major magazines.<br /><br /> The attraction of Szyk’s work was not only topical but also stylistic. His meticulous craftsmanship was showcased by excessively detailed drawings. Szyk’s prolific output belied his careful, methodical, patient way of working. Viewers were fascinated with Szyk’s drawing, which served the interests of propaganda for the war effort but also as works of art that might stand on their own.<br /><br /> Szyk’s biting sarcasm, ridicule and opprobrium against the Axis powers raised the morale of Allied troops who saw his caricatures of the enemy wherever they served. On the home front there was an emotional resonance with the cartoons and drawings, which portrayed the ugly and grotesque nature of the foe. For example, Szyk pictured Himmler, Goering and Hoess as toadies to Hitler and otherwise in the worst possible light.<br /><br /> But Szyk was more than a cartoonist. He was also a fine artist whose gouache paintings of Jewish tradition and American history issued from him in a steady stream. Perhaps his most well-known Jewish work is his Haggadah, a 48-page masterpiece that took six years to complete and was published in 1940, the year Szyk moved from Europe to the United States.<br /><br /> After the war, Szyk continued to pursue the themes of freedom and tolerance. In one cartoon, a black man pleads for forgiveness from his Ku Klux Klan tormentors. He is dressed in the uniform of an Army soldier with a Purple Heart on his chest. (Szyk died in 1951 unable to witness the full grown Civil Rights Movement.)<br /><br /> With the Third Reich in ruins, Szyk also turned to commercial art and book illustration, and to his ongoing Jewish and American themes. These included a series on the Book of Esther, the Ten Commandments, the Book of Job, presidents of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. Forty years later, Szyk’s acclaim would bring him the first solo artist retrospective exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.<br /><br /> Szyk was an artist with a clear philosophy. He was on a personal mission to use his artistic talents to serve the Jewish people and all humanity. He was so consumed with getting his message across that virtually everything he created had a political purpose. For example, the 20 miniatures comprising his version of the Book of Esther form a powerful political statement on anti-Semitism and are an allegorical commentary on the state of religious freedom in Poland.<br /><br /> By coincidence the Arthur Szyk Society is headquartered in the Bay Area, under the leadership of Rabbi Irvin Ungar who is devoted to collecting and archiving Szyk-related materials.<br /><br /> This summer Ungar is accompanying an entourage to Poland to attend the opening of a Szyk exhibit cosponsored by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture and the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. The Szyk Society Web site is <a href="http://www.szyk.org">http://www.szyk.org</a>.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /> <b>“Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole”</b> by Joseph P. Ansell (332 pages, The Littman Library, $49.95).</p> <p> </p>

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