12 Facts About Seymour Rosofsky

Seymour Rosofsky was an American artist, who has been described as one of the key figures in twentieth-century Chicago art.

Seymour Rosofsky was recognized for his deftness as a painter, his interest in drawing as a process and medium, and as a caricaturist.

Seymour Rosofsky was featured in the Franz Schulze's book Fantastic Images and Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago.

Seymour Rosofsky was born to Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants on the West Side of Chicago in 1924.

Seymour Rosofsky painted from an young age and took weekend classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a young teen.

Seymour Rosofsky was featured, along with Campoli, Golub, and Theodore Halkin in the Art Institute's "Veteran's Exhibition" of 1948.

Seymour Rosofsky's work has continued to be shown since his death in museums, galleries and public spaces.

In 2011, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel chose Seymour Rosofsky's striking but grim Unemployment Agency from the Art Institute's collection to hang on the wall behind his desk at City Hall.

Seymour Rosofsky taught at Chicago Loop College from 1964 until his death from a heart attack in 1981.

Seymour Rosofsky has been cited by many artists, including Phyllis Bramson and William Conger, as an influence.

Seymour Rosofsky was drawn to doleful and withering themes, such as the individual's loss of power in modern life, fraught male-female relationships, the abuse of power and the absurdity of war, often borne out in battered, distorted, sometimes grotesquely comic figures in haunting, fantastical interiors and cityscapes.

Time spent in Paris on a fellowship led to a greater surrealist turn in Seymour Rosofsky's work, realized in a fantastical, frightening vocabulary of clowns, menacing faces, and bizarre scenarios urgency and a more intense color palette.