38 Facts About Chaim Goldberg

Chaim Goldberg was a Polish-Israeli-American artist, painter, sculptor, and engraver.

Chaim Goldberg is known for being a chronicler of Jewish life in the eastern European Polish villages like the one in his native Kazimierz Dolny in south-eastern Poland.

Chaim Goldberg witnessed the colorful life and began to draw what he saw.

Chaim Goldberg yearned to experience life as they did for himself, and later undertook the mission of being a leading painter of Holocaust-era art, which to the artist was seen as an obligation and art with a sense of profound mission.

Chaim Goldberg was the ninth child and the first boy after eight girls.

Chaim Goldberg grew up in a religious home in Kazimierz Dolny.

Chaim Goldberg would observe and draw the beggars and klezmers who frequented his home as guests.

Chaim Goldberg then got him several small scholarships based on these letters of recommendation.

Chaim Goldberg became stimulated by this interaction with the artists and despite being totally unschooled in that craft.

Chaim Goldberg studied the actions of the artists and they encouraged him to become involved.

Chaim Goldberg set himself up with a home-made easel, and painted outdoors.

Chaim Goldberg was conscripted into the Polish army in the fall of 1938.

Chaim Goldberg was assigned to the artillery brigade that guarded Warsaw.

Chaim Goldberg would escape but was unsuccessful in the attempts to convince his parents and family of the plans of the Germans about treating Jews badly.

Chaim Goldberg received a fellowship from the Polish Ministry of Culture to study at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, and in 1949 they returned to Poland.

Chaim Goldberg worked on various commissions for the Polish Government and, in 1955, made an application to be allowed to immigrate to Israel.

Chaim Goldberg exhibited, and Rachel sold his work to American, and Canadian tourists, and Israeli collectors.

Chaim Goldberg added in the studio the black lines to the color areas as a final step.

Once ensconced in his large studio, Chaim Goldberg began to create large paintings that depicted Jewish life he recalled in his Shtetl of Kazimierz Dolny.

Chaim Goldberg engraved and sculpted in wood, stone, and metal.

In 1967, Chaim Goldberg arrived in the United States, with a two-year business visa on an exhibition tour and continued to paint, and create line engravings of his village characters, as well as sculpt.

In 1974, Chaim Goldberg attended a performance of Emmett Kelly, Jr.

In videotaped interviews with the artist's son, Shalom, it becomes clear that Chaim Goldberg's career took two parallel paths of creation by virtue of his ability to compartmentalize his time and to the success of his Judaic theme to support him and his family throughout his life.

In 1970 the famous Yiddish Stage Dancer and friend of the artist, Felix Fibich, posed for Chaim Goldberg by striking dance positions on a low-standing coffee table in the artist's living room.

Chaim Goldberg quickly executed numerous pencil drawings while his son, Shalom made BW photographs that he later developed in his darkroom.

In 1942 while in exile in Russia, Chaim Goldberg began making an effort to document what he heard.

Chaim Goldberg returned to Poland with his wife and son, Victor, and began to create over 150 works of art dealing with the Holocaust, many of which are in the permanent collection of several museums, namely the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.

The chart below documents Chaim Goldberg's concurrent themes and thus his push-pull between creating more art for his mission to make Shtetl Life eternalized and his actual need for a Post-War series of themes and methodologies of creating art; all proving that his brand is a more balanced one rather that and intended one for commercialization.

Chaim Goldberg trained himself in compartmentalizing his various themes by using different areas of his studio at different times of the day.

Chaim Goldberg would go to his painting studio to paint based on a stream of creative time, and then have lunch with his wife, Rachel.

Chaim Goldberg responded to modern life around him after a brief shock, and each evening, after dinner, he sat in the kitchen, or his den, and made hundreds of pen and ink drawings that can best be defined, as Emotivism.

Chaim Goldberg experimented with this as a "cleansing," as he called it, starting in Israel as early as 1964.

Chaim Goldberg returned to the world of abstract expressionism and concurrently created sculptures and engravings.

Chaim Goldberg danced right into shapes he called upon, carved them out of wood, and chiseled them out of white and pink marble.

In 1973, still not an American citizen, Chaim Goldberg was invited to exhibit his engravings, drawings, watercolors and oil paintings at the Smithsonian Institution's Hall of Graphic Arts, recognizing his exceptional engraving talents and the works he created in the short time period of five years since landing on the American shores.

In 1997, Chaim Goldberg's work went on exhibit at the Rosen Museum of Art, Boca Raton,.

In 1987, while working on the modernist themes above, Chaim Goldberg returned to painting his beloved Kazimierz Dolny and the Jewish life in the village.

Chaim Goldberg died on June 26,2004, in Boca Raton, Florida, aged 87.