Emil Armin

Emil Armin (1 April 1883 – 2 July 1971) was an American artist known for his use of vibrant color and brushwork.[5] From the 1920s through his death in 1971, Armin maintained a high profile in Chicago's artistic community.[6]

Emil Armin
Born(1883-04-01)1 April 1883[1]
Rădăuți, Austria-Hungary (now Romania)[2]
Died2 July 1971(1971-07-02) (aged 88)[1]
Chicago, Illinois[3]
NationalityAmerican[4]
EducationSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago[2]
Known forPainting
Notable work
Mountain Farm, Santa Fe (1928)
MovementModernism

Art critic Samuel Putnam, of the Chicago Evening Post, described Armin as "perhaps the most finely sensitized artist in Chicago…with a soul of a peasant and poet and the mind of a philosopher."[7]

Early life and education

Armin was born in Rădăuți, Austria-Hungary (now Romania) in 1883.[2] His grandfather was a Jewish scribe, copying sacred scrolls for the local temple. [7] Armin began drawing at the age of five and presumably learned woodcarving from his father, Hirsch Lieb,[8]:41 who was an amateur artist. [4]

When Armin was 10, his parents died, leaving him an orphan.[8]:42 He was raised by older siblings until he got a full-time job at a restaurant at age 14 and moved into the home of the owner. [8]:54 After a restaurant patron encourage him to attend art school,[8]:55 he moved to Chernivtsi in 1901 at age 18 to study art. [8]:58

In 1905, Armin emigrated to the United States, to join his brother Sigmund and his sister Frieda in Chicago, where he continued to draw sketches whenever he could while unhappily working in a wealthy cousin's store.[8]:63

Armin began his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1908, and he continued working and studying whenever possible, even through periods of great economic struggle.[9] In 1916, having saved four hundred dollars from his many jobs, he transitioned from taking only night classes to taking day classes as a full-time student,[8]:63 pausing only once during World War I to take a job making artillery harnesses at eighteen dollars a week.[8]:81

He studied under, and was inspired by, George Bellows, Randall Davey and Herman Sachs.[10] Other instructors included Albert Henry Krehbiel,[8]:69 Antonin Sterba,[8]:76 and Harry L. Timmins.[8]:80 In the Spring of 1920, at age 36 and twelve years after he first enrolled in a night class, Armin graduated.[2]

Early work
  • Fairyland (1922), Bernard Friedman Collection
  • Irene (1922), The Art Institute of Chicago
  • Miriam (1923), Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
  • Wood Lake (1924), Lakewood, Michigan
  • City Scene (1924), Hand-Carved Frame
  • The Dream (1924), Smart Museum, University of Chicago
  • Untitled (Mountain) (1924), Richard Norton Gallery
  • Frances Strain (1924), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Collection
  • Chicago (1925), The Art Institute of Chicago
  • The Dreamer, (1925), The Art Institute of Chicago
  • Portrait by Emil Armin, (1925), Private Collection

Career

Armin's artwork included paintings, woodcuts, woodcarvings, sculptures, cartoons and etchings, but he is best known for his paintings.[11] He was a modernist painter, with a fondness for painting landscapes, primitive peoples, flowers and animals.[12]

In his work, Armin synthesized contemporary artistic trends with inspiration drawn from his Jewish roots and from the peasant traditions of the American Southwest and his native Eastern Europe.[13]

Most of his work was completed in Chicago. After finishing his studies, Armin joined a group of artists, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Francis Strain and Charles Biesel, at the 57th Street Art Colony in Hyde Park, near Stony island Avenue,[14] where he lived and worked until 1925.[8]:100 (This group of artists was called the Fifty Seventh Street Group and were also known as the Jackson Park Colony.[15] Other notable artists that joined included Frances Foy, Gustaf Dalstrom and Beatrice S. Levy.[8]:101)

Armin then shared an art studio with fellow modernist Todros Geller at 59 East Adams[16] from 1926 to 1930.[8]:88,130 He then briefly moved to the North Side of Chicago, where he worked and lived at 927 Sunnyside Avenue before permanently relocating back to the South Side on Harper Avenue in Hyde Park.[8]:134–135

His Chicago exhibits in the 1920s included the No-jury Society, Cor Ardens, Neo-Arlimusc, and the Chicago Society of Artists. In the 1930s he entered the Grant Park Art Fair, and he worked as an easel painter for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).[7] In 1940, Armin secured a job working for the Illinois Art Project. In this post Armin visited other artists working for the Project offering advice and criticism. It was also in 1940 that Armin, along with other local Jewish artists, formed the American Jewish Art Club and continued to exhibit with them until his death.[17]

Expanding his horizons beyond Chicago, Armin also traveled to work, briefly relocating to Dayton[8]:98 and making trips to the Indiana Dunes, the Wisconsin Dells,[8]:112 New Mexico,[8]:126 Maine[8]:116 and later in life to Lake Chapala in Mexico.[11]

Over time, Armin was able to make a modest living as an artist, selling his art and making ends meet with occasional jobs teaching art, including working with the Jewish Board of Education and teaching at Hull House.[8]:115–116

Armin exhibited regionally and nationally until he died at age 88.[7]

Works Progress Administration (WPA) artwork
  • July Morning (1940), WPA, Federal Art Project
  • River and Clouds (1941), WPA, Federal Art Project

Approach to art

Armin believed that "the way an artist finds it necessary to live in modern times will automatically assert itself in his work, if he is a true and independent artist." [18]

Critical response

Armin made an impression with the local Chicago art critics. J. Z. Jacobson, an art critic for The Chicagoan, covered Armin's work and eventually wrote a full book on Armin called Thirty-Five Saints and Emil Armin, in which he described Armin as "Playful as a child. Solemn as a prophet. Funny as a clown. Poor as St. Francis of Assisi and almost as happy. Taking the slings and arrows of outrageous fate with stoic calm." [8]:12

Role in Chicago Modernism
Ad designed by Armin for the No-Jury Society's 1923 Cubist Ball

Following his graduation in 1920, Armin became an active member in Chicago's emerging modernist art community,[4] which emphasized freedom of individual expression as its sole doctrine. [13] (Art historian Sue Ann Price has described the Chicago Modernism movement as the "city's vitriolic struggle between an old guard who advanced the ideals of traditional nineteenth-century art and an avantgarde of painters, illustrators, photographers, and sculptors who espoused the new modernist art from Europe."[19])

In 1913, Armin had visited the controversial Armory Show when it was exhibited at the Art Institute, and he fell under the sway of European and American modernism.[20]

Inspired by the modernist movement, Armin and other Chicago artists formed their own open and free groups—including The Introspectives, the Cor Ardens, Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, and Neo-Arlimusc—to provide an alternative to the conservative Art Institute of Chicago.[21]

Active in all of these groups, Armin exhibited in every one of the No-Jury Society's shows beginning with the second,[8]:101 and eventually served as president of the Society.[2] He also exhibited with the Chicago Society of Artists,[2] which had taken a contentious turn to modernism in 1923.[22]

Marriage and family

In 1945, at the age of 65, Armin married Hilda Rose Diamond, a social worker for the Jewish Family and Community Service in Chicago.[17]

References
  1. "List of Illinois Artists". Illinois Historical Art Project. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 23 December 2010.
  2. "Emil Armin (1883-1971)". Bernard Friedman. Archived from the original on 16 May 2019. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  3. "Emil Armin". Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  4. "Emil Armin Biography". The Annex Galleries. Retrieved 12 December 2019.
  5. "Emil Armin". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Archived from the original on 26 September 2017. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  6. Judith A. Barter; Andrew Walker; Art Institute of Chicago (2003). Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier, 1890-1940. Hudson Hills. pp. 147–. ISBN 978-0-86559-199-8.
  7. "Emil Armin Biography". Illinois State Museum. Archived from the original on 9 July 2018. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  8. Jacob Zavel Jacobson (1929). Thirty-five Saints and Emil Armin. L. M. Stein.
  9. "Emil Armin Paintings in Oil". Renaissance Society. Archived from the original on 16 September 2017. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  10. "Emil Armin". Illinois Historical Art Project. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
  11. "Emil Armin Painted Lake Chapala". Sombrero Books. Archived from the original on 8 January 2019. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
  12. Irving Cutler (1 January 1996). The Jews of Chicago: from shtetl to suburb. University of Illinois Press. pp. 145–. ISBN 978-0-252-02185-5. Retrieved 14 January 2011.
  13. Amy Theobald Ross (1 January 2018). Art of Illinois (PDF). Illinois Governor’s Mansion Association. pp. 145–. ISBN 978-0-692-09959-9. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  14. "In the old 57th Street Art Colony". Chicago History Museum. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
  15. Jan Pinkerton; Randolph H. Hudson (2009). Encyclopedia of the Chicago Literary Renaissance. Infobase Publishing. pp. 177–. ISBN 978-1-4381-0914-5.
  16. "Todros Geller". Bernard Friedman. Archived from the original on 4 September 2019. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
  17. "Emil Armin Papers". Ryerson and Burnham Archives. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
  18. Maureen A. McKenna (1 January 1980). Emil Armin 1883–1971. The Museum. pp. 8–. ISBN 978-0897920872.
  19. Sue Ann Prince (1990). The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940. University of Chicago Press. pp. 4–. ISBN 978-0-226-68284-6.
  20. "Windy City (Snow Storm)". The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
  21. Robert Cozzolino (2007). Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. pp. 14–. ISBN 978-0-943836-29-4.
  22. "Flora Schofield". Illinois Historical Art Project. Retrieved 14 December 2019.
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