Biography
Jack J. Greitzer was born in New York in 1910. His early career took place in Cleveland, OH. He was in the Art Club at Cleveland Heights High School and studied at the Cleveland School of Art. He showed his work at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1932, 1934), winning first prize for his "Taormina Landscape #1" in 1934.
Greitzer exhibited in the "First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Prints" at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art (1933-1934). He married Ruth Kaye Sherr in 1934. The same year he created a lunette "Transportation" for the Cleveland Public Auditorium. In 1936 his art was shown at the Addison Gallery in Andover, MA and in two exhibits at the Whitney, "Paintings and Prints by Cleveland Artists" and the "Second Biennial Exhibition of Watercolors and Pastels."
Greitzer received two commissions for Post Office murals, both in 1938. One was for "Post Office Interiors" in Cleveland, OH, and the other was for "Cooperative Planning and Development of Wauseon" in Wauseon, OH. His work is in the collections of several national museums.
In later life Greitzer moved to Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he produced paintings that extolled the natural beauty of Florida. He died in Fort Lauderdale in 1989.
Critical Analysis
It's hard to make generalizations about Jack J. Greitzer's work from the small number of examples available to look at. In these examples his palette favors browns and grays, and he shows an interesting fondness for geometric structures. This is particularly clear in his 1930 "Sunlight Through the Clouds" and his Cleveland Post Office mural "Post Office Interiors." After looking at "Sunlight Through the Clouds," one realizes that Greitzer has captured a similar effect in the sky of "Cooperative Planning and Development of Wauseon," providing a nice optimistic aura for the town's future development.
Murals
- Cleveland, Ohio - Tower City Center: Post Office Interiors
- Wauseon, Ohio - Post Office: Cooperative Planning and Development of Wauseon
References
- Biography of Jack J. Greitzer (1910-1989) (Artprice).
- Covering History: Revisiting Federal Art in Cleveland 1933-43 (Teaching Cleveland Digital). Catalog for an exhibit at the Cleveland Artists Foundation, September 8 - November 25, 2006. Curated by Sharon E. Dean with an Introduction by Karal Ann Marling.
- Jack/Jacob Greitzer (Ancestry).
- Henry S. Francis, William M. Milliken, Review of the Exhibition, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art Volume 21, Number 5, May (1934). Prize for Greitzer's "Landscape, Taormina."