25 Facts About Todros Geller

Todros Geller was a Jewish American artist and teacher best known as a master printmaker and a leading artist among Chicago's art community.

Todros Geller studied art in Odessa and continued his studies after moving to Montreal in 1906 where he immigrated to Canada.

Todros Geller married and moved to Chicago in 1918, where he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago until 1923.

Todros Geller's work focused on Jewish tradition, often including moralistic themes and social commentary, shtetl, ghetto life, and the intersection of Jewish tradition with modern-day Chicago.

Todros Geller regarded art as a tool for social reform and he spent a large part of his career teaching art.

Todros Geller's work was commissioned for stained glass windows, bookplates, community centers and Yiddish and English books.

Todros Geller was regarded as a leader in the field of synagogue and religious art.

Todros Geller designed stained glass windows for synagogues in Omaha, Fort Worth, Dayton, Stamford, and Chicago Heights.

Todros Geller was a source of inspiration to Aaron Bohrod and Mitchell Siporin, among others.

Shteyn and Todros Geller shared a similar ideology, were both considered radical progressives, were part of the Chicago Jewish Left who worked to promote the Yiddish language and they both supported the Soviet Union for its commitment to the Yiddish language and to the Jewish settlement in Birobidzhan.

Todros Geller was one of the founding members of "Around the Palette" in Chicago in 1926, a club where artists shared their personal views of art and its role in society.

In 1929, Todros Geller visited Palestine, where he was inspired to paint Biblical themes such as his painting Jerusalem the Old which was included in the catalogue of the Art Institute of Chicago's thirty-third annual exhibition.

Todros Geller created a woodcut series entitled Seven Palestinian motifs cut on wood in 1930.

In 1931, Todros Geller provided illustrations for Rose G Lurie's book, The Great March: Post Biblical Jewish Stories, a selection of Jewish stories for children covering the period from the destruction of the First Temple to the expulsion from Spain.

Todros Geller was the most prominent of the 14 graphic artists who participated in A Gift to Biro-Bidjan in 1937, an album of 14 woodcuts produced as a fund-raising project for the Chicago ICOR to support the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.

Todros Geller's contribution to the portfolio was a woodcut based on Raisins and Almonds, the Yiddish lullaby written by Abraham Goldfaden in 1880 for his operetta Shulamis.

In 1937, Shteyn published a volume of about sixty woodcuts by Todros Geller called From Land to Land, produced as part of the Federal Art Project, the visual arts arm of the Great Depression-era New Deal Works Progress Administration Federal One program in the United States.

Todros Geller, who had spent time in the Southwest studying and painting Native American Indians, supervised the art project and painted around twelve of the portraits.

Todros Geller painted The Accordion Player in 1938 as part of the WPA Federal Art Project, an oil painting in the collection of the MacNider Art Museum in Mason City, Iowa.

Todros Geller provided illustrations for some of the Nebraska Folklore pamphlets, written and compiled by Nebraska's Writers' Project between 1937 and 1940.

Todros Geller was a member of the interracial faculty of art instructors that included local black artists such as Charles Davis, Charles White, Bernard Goss, William Carter and local white artists such as Morris Topchevsky, Si Gordon and Max Kahn.

Todros Geller became the first president of the American Jewish Arts Club following its formation in Chicago in 1940.

In 1942, Todros Geller provided woodcut-illustrations for Jewish dancing master Nathan Vizonsky's book Ten Jewish Folk Dances: A Manual for Teachers and Leaders published by the American-Hebrew Theatrical League in Chicago.

Todros Geller's woodcuts won three Library of Congress National Print Exhibition awards.

Todros Geller was survived by his wife Olga Geller, his daughter Esther Silverman and his sister.