Biography

Aaron Bohrod was born in Chicago, IL in 1907, the son of an immigrant grocer. He learned about art as a boy by doing a lot of sketching, trying out a correspondence course and enrolling in children's classes at the Art Institute. He taught himself anatomy by copying drawings from his older brother's medical textbooks. After graduating from Crane Tehnical High School, Bohrod enrolled at Crane Junior College in Chicago in 1925, with the intent of becoming a commerical artist. He supported himself doing advertisements for local and saved up enough money to go to New York, where he could study with John Sloan, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League. He returned to Chicago when his money ran out but was able to go back to New York in 1931-1932. In 1929 Bohrod married Ruth Bush, with whom he had two sons (Mark and Neil) and a daughter (Georgi Rothe).

Of his teachers at the Art Students League, it was John Sloan with whom he felt the greatest kinship. Sloan inspired him with the idea of doing for Chicago what Sloan had done for New York, that is, portray the seamy side of the city with verve and feeling. Back in Chicago, Bohrod successfully adapted Sloan's romantic realism to the environment of Chicago's North Side. He earned small amounts of money selling his artwork in Grant Park across from the Art Institute, and in 1934 he was adopted as a Rehn Gallery artists. This gained one-man shows for him, but these shows did not generate a lot of income.

Bohrod sold watercolors through the Chicago gallery run by Increase Robinson. She became State Director for the Federal Art Project in Illinois and facilitated commissions for Bohrod. These involved Post Office murals for Vandalia, IL (1935), Galesburg, IL (1938), and Clinton, IL (1939).

In 1936 Bohrod received a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative painting, on the strength of recommendations from Alexander Brook, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper and Eugene Speicher. The fellowship enabled him to travel to the American West and develop ideas for regional paintings in western locales. The fellowship was renewed in 1937, allowing him to travel to the North-East and South and further broaden the horizons of his artwork.

Bohrod was accepted into the Associated American Artists group in 1939, joining the distinguished company of Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, Raphael Soyer, Paul Sample and George Grosz. He taught briefly at the Art Institute in the early 1940s and was commissioned by the American Tobacco Company, along with five other prominent artists to document tobacco production in painting.

In 1941 Bohrod took up an Artist in Residency at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, but this position was interrupted by World War II. Bohrod served in the South Pacific with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1942, producing paintings that are now part of the Pentagon Collection. From 1943-1944 he was an artist-correspondent for Life Magazine, working in Normandy, Cherbourg, England and Germany.

After the war, with the death of John Stewart Curry, Bohrod was named Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison upon the recommendation of Grant Wood. He joined the faculty at Madison in 1948, where he worked until his retirement in 1973. Part of his work at the University of Wisconsin involved supervising artists in the university's Rural Arts Outreach program. In this capacity Bohrod traveled across the state, enabling him to document rural Wisconsin, urban and small-town life, and industrial scenes of the Great Lakes.

From 1950-1958 Bohrod worked with F. Carlton Ball in Madison and Carbondale, designing and decorating ceramics. In 1953 he shifted his focus as a painter from landscapes to still-life subjects. He approached this subject with what he called "magical realism." This trompe l'oeil approach to realism replaced the previous romantic realism of Bohrod's work and created a distinctive and very popular style.

Bohrod published two books: A Pottery Sketch-book (1959) and A Decade of Still Life (1966). The latter included many of Bohrod's trompe l'oeil paintings. Bohrod returned to pottery decoration in the 1980s. He died in Monona, WI in 1992.

Critical Analysis

Bohrod's painting career had two distinct phases. The first dates from his association with John Sloan, when he became an excellent exponent of the Ashcan School. In this phase Bohrod depicted boldly-drawn urban scenes and landscapes. Like Sloan, Bohrod was attracted to the underbelly of urban and rural life - people facing poverty and other challenges.

The second phase of Bohrod's career began in 1953. It involved a very different type of painting - much more precise, to the point of being hyper-realistic. Bohrod's works in this period were often a collage-like assembly of objects, each one rendered with great precision, but the whole often produced a baffling effect. The realism of the individual objects in his paintings caused galleries to hang "Do not touch" signs next to his work. But the complex compositions kept viewers studying each work a length to try to figure out its meaning.

Murals

• Clinton, Illinois - Post Office: Clinton in Winter
• Galesburg, Illinois - Post Office: Breaking the Prairie - Log City, 1837
• Vandalia, Illinois - Post Office: Old State Capital in Vandalia, Illinois

References

1. Aaron Bohrod (askART).
2. Aaron Bohrod (Wikipedia).
3. Aaron Bohrod (ACA Galleries).
4. Aaron Bohrod (Cooper Hewitt).
5. Aaron Bohrod (Madron Gallery).
6. Jim Lane, Aaron Bohrod, Art Now and Then September 6 (2013).
7. Aaron Bohrod (Benton Museum of Art).
8. Aaron Bohrod (Modernism in the New City).
9. Aaron Bohrod (1907-1992) (D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc.).
10. Aaron Bohrod in his Studio (Wisconsin Historical Society).
11. Helen Trieglaff, Contemporary American Artists: Aaron Bohrod, Parnassas 12(4) (1940).