31 Facts About Chaim Gross

Chaim Gross was an American sculptor and educator of Hungarian Jewish origin.

Chaim Gross was born to a Jewish family in Maramaros County, Kingdom of Hungary, in the village of Okormezo, in the Carpathian Mountains.

Chaim Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Bela Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country.

Chaim Gross sent money to Chaim and his other brother Avrom-Lieb, the two of whom traveled from Vienna to Le Havre, France, from where they took a boat to New York in March 1921.

Chaim Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent.

Chaim Gross attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Adolph Gottlieb, and Peter Blume.

In 1926, Chaim Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years.

Chaim Gross began exhibiting sculpture in group shows of students at the Educational Alliance, and then at the Jewish Art Center in the Bronx.

In 1929, Chaim Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville.

Chaim Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades.

In March 1932, Chaim Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City.

Chaim Gross was primarily a practitioner of the direct carving method, with the majority of his work being carved from wood.

Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States, with substantial holdings at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Chaim Gross's work was part of the sculpture event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics.

In 1933, Chaim Gross joined the US government's Public Works of Art Project, which transitioned into the Works Progress Administration, which Chaim Gross worked for later in the 1930s.

Under these programs Chaim Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures that were placed in schools and public colleges, made work for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Chaim Gross was recognized during these years with a silver medal at the Exposition universelle de 1937 in Paris, and in 1942, with a purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Artists for Victory" exhibition for his wood sculpture of famed circus performer Lillian Leitzel.

In 1938, filmmaker and historian Lewis Jacobs made a 30-minute feature of Chaim Gross carving, called Tree Trunk to Head, showing Chaim Gross at work in his East Village studio on a portrait of his wife, who models in the film.

Chaim Gross began a portrait in clay and then traveled to Israel in the summer of that year hoping to be able to meet Weizmann and have him sit for a portrait.

Weizmann was too ill, but Chaim Gross completed the bust in bronze later that year.

Chaim Gross returned to Israel for three months in 1951 to paint a series of 40 watercolors of life in various cities.

Chaim Gross's large-scale bronze The Family, donated to New York City in 1991 in honor of Mayor Ed Koch, and installed at the Bleecker Street Park at 11th Street, is a fixture of Greenwich Village.

In 1957, Chaim Gross published The Techniques of Wood Sculpture, an influential how-to book with photographs of him at work by famed photographer Eliot Elisofon.

In 1977, Chaim Gross had three retrospective exhibitions: at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, followed by the Montclair Art Museum; and the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

In 1979, Chaim Gross was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full Academician in 1981.

Chaim Gross died at Beth Israel Hospital in May 1991 and was buried at Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Queens, New York.

In 1994, Forum Gallery, which now represents the Chaim Gross estate, held a memorial exhibition featuring a sixty-year survey of Gross's work.

Chaim Gross was a professor of printmaking and sculpture at both the Educational Alliance and the New School for Social Research in New York City, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the MoMA art school, the Art Student's League and the New Art School.

Chaim Gross was a member of the New York Artists Equity Association and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.

Chaim Gross was a founder and served as the first president of the Sculptors Guild.

In 1932, Gross married Renee Nechin, and they had two children, Yehuda and Mimi.