John Himmelfarb (born 1946) is an American artist, known for idiosyncratic, yet modernist-based work across many media.Bonesteel, Michael. "Building on Literature, Music, and Modernism: The Prints of John Himmelfarb," In The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004, by Michael Bonesteel and Linda K. Kramer, Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. Diverse influences ranging from Miró, Matisse and Picasso to Dubuffet, New York school artists like de Kooning, Guston, and Pop artists inform his work, described by critics and curators as chaotically complex and tightly constructed.Murman, Lydia. "John Himmelfarb," New Art Examiner, October 1982, p. 72.Aurinko, Susan. Exhibition essay, John Himmelfarb: Multi-Dimensional, Chicago: Flatfile Galleries, 2007.Allen, Jane Addams and Derek Guthrie. Preface, The Family Dog: Drawings by John Himmelfarb. Darryl Licht Transport, 42 pgs, 1973. He often employs energetic, gestural line, dense patterns of accumulated shapes, and fluid movement between figuration and abstraction, using strategies of concealment and revelation to create a sense of meaning that is both playful and elusive.Brunetti, John. "John Himmelfarb," New Art Examiner, December/January 1996-97.Castle, Frederick Ted. "John Himmelfarb at Terry Dintenfass and John Nichols." Art in America, December 1987, p. 161-162.Haydon, Harold. "His Images Reflect Our Hectic World," Chicago Sun Times, April 11, 1976. His work is also unified by "a circulating library" of motifs and organizing structures, such as geographic and urban mapping, abstracted natural and industrial forms, and language systems.Bates, Geoffrey. Exhibition catalogue essay, A Circulating Library: John Himmelfarb, Selected Recent Works, Kenosha, WI: Carthage College, H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art, 2009.Artner, Alan. Review, Chicago Tribune. Tempo 9C, Section 5. January 25, 1996. Assessing him at mid-career, New Art Examiner’s Andy Argy wrote "Himmelfarb’s art is original […] His unabashed immersion in graphic art, emphasizing drawing over painting, has earned him an important place among artists who make drawings into major aesthetic statements."Argy, Andy. "John Himmelfarb--Evanston Art Center," New Art Examiner, March 1987, p. 44. Himmelfarb next turned to monumental paintings that critic Christopher Moore called joyful, luminous, and frenetic pyrotechnical displays. In 2006, he began to devote considerable studio time to sculpture that curator Gregg Hertzlieb described as an expression of the "human need for play and (our) enduring fascination with metamorphosis and transformation."Hertzlieb, Gregg. Exhibition catalogue, Valparaiso, IN: Brauer Museum of Art, 2014.
Himmelfarb has an extensive exhibition history, notably at the Terry Dintenfass and Luise Ross galleries (New York), Jean Albano Gallery (Chicago), Chicago Cultural Center, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Eskenazi Museum of Art (Indiana University, Bloomington), Brooklyn Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago. His work sits in more than fifty public collections in the US and abroad, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Museum, and High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He has been recognized with a Yaddo Fellowship and an Arts/Industry Residency at Kohler, Wisconsin, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Illinois Arts Council.Bonesteel, Michael and Linda K. Kramer. The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004, Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. Himmelfarb works and lives in Chicago and Spring Green, Wisconsin, with his wife, Molly Day.
Life and career John Himmelfarb was born in 1946 in Chicago, and grew up in rural Winfield Township, Illinois. His parents, Eleanor and Sam Himmelfarb, were both painters and his father also had an industrial design firm called 3-Dimensions.Sheridan, Helen. "Biography," Meetings in the Garden. The Art of John Himmelfarb, Exhibition catalog, Kalamazoo, MI: Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989.Bonesteel, Michael. "Tracking the Backtracker: John Himmelfarb in the Garden," Meetings in the Garden. The Art of John Himmelfarb, Exhibition catalog, Kalamazoo, MI: Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989. All three exhibited together on a few occasions.Barilleaux, Rene Paul. "Samuel Himmelfarb, Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb: Three Painters." Exhibition catalog. Quincy, IL: Quincy Art Center. 1994. Museum visits, art-focused travels and serious conversations about art, music and literature were constants in Himmelfarb's early family life. In 1964, he enrolled at Harvard College with no intention of an art career.Kramer, Linda K. "John Himmelfarb: A Life in Art," In The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004, by Michael Bonesteel and Linda K. Kramer, Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. That changed after a junior-year independent study in drawing with sculptor Wil Reimann and encouragement from faculty artists Robert S. Neuman and Mirko Basaldella.Brewer, Nan. "John Himmelfarb: A Chicago-based Artist’s IU Connections,” Art from All Angles, Indiana University: Eskenazi Museum of Art. Retrieved June 5, 2018. By 1968, when he graduated with an Architectural Sciences Urban Planning degree, he had already decided to become an artist.Nordland, Gerald. "A Painting in the Mural Scale: Nonverbal Demonstration," Inland Romance, Exhibition catalogue essay, Oakton Community College: William A. Koehnline Gallery, 2001.
Intending to support his art by teaching, Himmelfarb enrolled in the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 1970, he completed his degree, and also met his future wife, Molly Day. After traveling abroad, he moved back to Chicago, worked out of his parents’ studio, and in his first studio sale, generated the proceeds to set up his own studio. In late 1971, he and Molly bought a house in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, and after marrying in 1972, remodeled the house into a combination home and studio.Smith, Betsy Stuart. "Life in a near south side barrio." Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1974. In the years that followed, they had two children, Forest, born in 1979 and now a businessman, and Serena, born in 1986, who is now also a painter.
Lacking the pedigree of an MFA or New York residence, Himmelfarb pursued his art career in an unusual way, with a kind of Midwestern practicality. He built his reputation with extended road trips, meeting individually with museum curators and gallery owners throughout the Midwest, and cultivating collectors through small showings in people's homes in places as far-flung as Omaha, Minneapolis, Erie, and Boston.Farber, Janet. “Artist Himmelfarb returns to Omaha via new ‘vehicle’ at MAM,” The Reader, October 5, 2012. Retrieved June 7, 2018. His unorthodox strategy worked, long-term. By the late 1970s, he secured acquisitions from the Art Institute of ChicagoArt Institute of Chicago. Collections, John Himmelfarb. Retrieved June 6, 2018. and Smithsonian, and a widespread support base, which convinced Terry Dintenfass, Gallery 72 (Omaha), and Barbara Balkin (Chicago) to represent him. He also earned attention from critics such as New Art Examiner co-founder Jane Addams Allen and the Chicago Sun Times’ Harold Haydon,Haydon, Harold. "An Art Exhibit with Doubtful Art." Chicago Sun Times, February 23, 1979. and shows at universities and museums across the Midwest.Castle, Frederick Ted. "Himmelfarb: Black on White" Exhibition catalogue, Davenport, IA: Davenport Art Gallery, January 1986. Later, he would show at the Luise Ross, Jean Albano and Thomas McCormick (Chicago), and Modern Arts Midtown (Omaha) galleries, and at museums such as the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Huntington Museum of Art (West Virginia), Davenport Museum of Art (Iowa), and Sioux City Art Center.John Himmelfarb website, Resume. Retrieved June 5, 2018.
Work
Himmelfarb's relative distance from traditional art-world channels led his work in a similarly idiosyncratic direction, less focused on novelty or aesthetic polemics, and more on intuition, personal iconography and building on modernist tradition. With a "restless creative energy," he freely explored media—drawing, printmaking, painting, and more recently, sculpture, ceramics and tapestry—creating a highly diverse body of work consistent in its formal convictions and its humanistic preoccupations with humanity's relationship to nature (including its own), the organization of civilization, and the structures of visual communication and language.Artner, Alan. Review, Chicago Tribune. October 5, 2007.Brunetti, John. “Drawing Through Writing/Writing Through Drawing: the Gestalt of John Himmelfarb’s Prints,” John Himmelfarb website, Essays, 1999. Retrieved June 7, 2018.McComas, Jenny. "John Himmelfarb," Eskenazi Museum of Art Newsletter, Indiana University, November/December 2009. His work is perhaps best organized by major series, which tend to employ multiple media: 1) Early drawings and prints; 2) "Meetings"; 3) Language-related series; 4) "Inland Romance"; and 5) "Trucks."
Early drawings and prints Himmelfarb initially focused on black-and-white ink drawings and prints of "piled-up complexity" that critics related to surrealist automatic drawing or magic-realism. In enigmatic works as large as four by eight feet, a restless, wiry contour line created a dynamic, shifting focus from macrocosm to microcosm, pattern to image, and abstraction to figuration, as animals, people, plants and structures emerged and de-materialized into an edge-to-edge, interlocking tapestry of organic and geometric shapes.Brunetti, John. “Revelation Through Concealment: the Elusive Nature of John Himmelfarb’s Prints,” John Himmelfarb website, Essays, 2000. Retrieved June 7, 2018. Critics like Jane Addams Allen and Derek Guthrie saw in the maze of observation, incident and detail multiple levels of perception: a sense of nature "synonymous with rhythms of life"; a visualization of civilization reflecting Himmelfarb's urban planning studies; and a wry humor springing from juxtapositions of gesture, proportion and form.Allen, Jane Addams. "Two Artists in Search of Pure Expression," Washington Times, March 15, 1985. P. 3B. Harold Haydon wrote of his "astonishment at the artist’s inventive genius" and "endless satisfaction in deciphering imagery and discovering hidden humor and irony." In time, Himmelfarb expanded into color prints and paintings, including his early-1980s "Boatman," a cycle of more primitive works executed in slashing, swirling brushstrokes, that updated the classic "ship of fools" theme in works suggesting man "crowding himself into oblivion."
"Meeting" series (1982–1990)