BORN: Latvia, 1904

DIED: Chicago, 1976

Samuel Himmelfarb was born in Latvia in 1904, but moved to the United States at a young age and spent his early years in Wisconsin. He began his formal art education at the Wisconsin School of Fine Arts, Milwaukee State Teachers College, under German-born artist Gustave Moeller, and at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1924). Himmelfarb pursued further instruction in New York City, where he studied at the National Academy of Design (1926) and with Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League (1929).

Himmelfarb worked for several architecture firms in New York, but returned to the Midwest in the early 1930s and settled in Chicago with his wife, Eleanor, also a painter. After designing several exhibits for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, he founded the industrial exhibition firm Three Dimensions. The company provided a steady income for Himmelfarb while he pursued a career as a fine artist.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Himmelfarb exhibited his work widely, including group shows at the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors Exhibitions in the early 1920s and 1938, the Arts Club of Chicago (1952–55), in the National Circulating Exhibit by the American Federation of Arts (1953), and in numerous exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (1935 to 1957), where his Men on a Boat won the James Brodas Clarke Memorial Prize in 1949. Solo shows at the Milwaukee Art Institute (1932), the Panoras Gallery in New York (1956), and the Frank Ryan Gallery, Chicago (1958), also generated critical and popular interest in his art.

Following his retirement in the late 1960s from Three Dimensions, Himmelfarb dedicated himself full-time to painting and remained an active member of the Chicago arts community until his death in 1976. He was a member of Artists Equity and the Arts Club of Chicago, and lectured frequently to business and professional organizations on the relationship between the fine arts and industrial design. Himmelfarb realized his goal of creating “intriguing ‘thing’ patterns” in his mature works, in which abstracted figures, flattened spaces, and a nearly mechanical technique result in highly decorative patterned surfaces.

Himmelfarb’s artistic career was intimately linked with those of his wife and his son, John Himmelfarb, a successful contemporary artist. In the late 1930s, Samuel and Eleanor designed a modernist house and studio in rural Winfield, Illinois. Its isolated, wooded setting served as an inspiration for Eleanor’s landscapes and profoundly shaped John’s development as an artist. Several exhibitions in the early 1990s showed the works of all three Himmelfarbs together.

References

“Art: The Work of Samuel Himmelfarb.” Inland Architect 1, no. 7 (1958). Chicago Artists’ Archives: Himmelfarb Family File. Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago.

“Biographical Notes.” Samuel Himmelfarb: People Paintings and Drawings. Milwaukee: Charles Allis Art Library, 1969.

Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888–1950. Madison, CT: Soundview Press, 1990.

Falk, Peter Hastings, ed. Who Was Who in American Art 1564–1975: 400 Years of Artists in America. Vol. 2. Madison, CT: Soundview Press, 1999.

Galpin, Amy, and Susan Weininger. “Samuel Himmelfarb.” In Elizabeth Kennedy, ed., Chicago Modern, 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, 121. Chicago: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2004.

Three Painters: Samuel Himmelfarb, Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb. Quincy, IL: Quincy Art Center, 1994.

Two Generations Chicago: The Influence of Family. Evanston, IL: Evanston Art Center, 1990.

Weinberg, H. Barbara, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry. American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, distributed by H. N. Abrams, 1994.

Elizabeth Kennedy, "Chicago Modern 1893-1945", p. 121

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