David Aronson David Aaronson Original Vintage Modern Lithuanian American Boston Massachusetts Abstract Expressionist Still Life Oil Painting
David Aronson, (David Aaronson (1923- 2015); was a Lithuanian-American Expressionist artist whose vivid paintings, charcoal drawings and sculptures captured the tension between his Orthodox Jewish upbringing and the biblical injunction against making graven images.
Mr. Aronson’s work animated Old and New Testament allegories to convey universal human emotions — defying the deference of his father, a rabbi, to the Second Commandment. A leader, with Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine, of the so-called Boston Expressionist movement, Mr. Aronson was influential as both a painter and a professor. Aronson joined the newly formed School of Fine and Applied Arts (now the College of Fine Arts) at Boston University in 1955, as the first chairman of its Division of Art (now the School of Visual Arts). He was appointed a tenured professor in 1962 and taught there until his retirement in 1989. He established the university’s art gallery, in 1958. In 1945, when Mr. Aronson was only 22, a show of his paintings at the Niveau Gallery in Manhattan inspired the New York Times critic Howard Devree to conclude that Mr. Aronson “is still in a highly eclectic and formative period, but his ambition is boundless.” Less than a year later, he was the youngest artist featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Fourteen Americans.” David Aronson was born in Shilova, Lithuania, on Oct. 28, 1923. His family immigrated to the United States in 1929, and settled in the Boston area; where his father, Peisach, supervised the butchering of kosher meat. His mother was the former Gertrude Shapiro. He attended Hebrew Teachers College, (now Hebrew College) in Roxbury, but left after two years.
He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he studied under Karl Zerbe and taught for 12 years before being invited to direct the emerging visual arts program at Boston University.
Among his most prominent works are “The Golem,” a 1958 painting, and “The Door,” a large bronze triptych completed in 1969, both owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as “Spirit of Israel,” a 1986 sculpture at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.
In 1963, Time magazine hailed Mr. Aronson as having “succeeded where few contemporaries have even dared to try in marrying today’s religious concerns with the visual arts.”
“The unending search for meaning, both motivated and frustrated his journey,” Bernard H. Pucker, Mr. Aronson’s art dealer, recalled at his funeral.
Almost from the beginning, Mr. Aronson’s religious imagery and figurative Expressionism provoked controversy. A review of his exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan in 1953 described his New Testament iconography as “somewhat sensational,” but added that “it is their evident piety which saves these pictures from being grotesque,” and concluded that “the repetition of a single physical type among the actors, said to be the artist himself, is perhaps a metaphysical statement of total individual engagement in Christ’s sufferings and triumph.”
David Aaronson, (David Aronson)
(1923- 2015)
Lithuanian American
Boston Expressionist Movement
Still Life, Flowers in a Vase, on a Table. (Interior)
16" X 28", plus frame
Condition: Excellent original condition with no overpaints. To the upper left, appears there may be a small chip; unknown, due to artist' creation method of layering paints. Please review images. The painting is in all original condition with no overpaints, previous restoration, or cleanings.
Painting is hand signed lower right
Age is estimated to be a very early work by the artist, at approximately 1955, or a bit earlier.
Painting is still housed and secure in original gold brushed wood frame. The original frame is in very good original condition, as well.
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