Arthur Szyk - Legacy

Legacy

The immense popularity Szyk enjoyed in the United States in his lifetime gradually flagged after his death. From the 1960s to the end of the 1980s, the artist's works were seldom exhibited in American museums. This changed in 1991 when The Arthur Szyk Society was set up in Orange County, California. The founder of the Society was George Gooche, who discovered Szyk's unknown works and staged the exhibition "Arthur Szyk – Illuminator" in Los Angeles. In 1997, the seat of the Society was transferred to Burlingame, California, and a new Board of Trustees was elected, headed by rabbi, curator and antiquarian Irvin Ungar. The Society's work resulted in staging many exhibitions of Szyk's works in American cities in the 1990s, the Society also holds lectures and publishes books on the artist. Szyk's recent exhibitions include: "A One-Man Army: The Art of Arthur Szyk" at the Holocaust Museum Houston (October 20, 2008 – February 8, 2009); "The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk" at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (April 10 – October 14, 2002); "Arthur Szyk: Artist for Freedom" at the Library of Congress (December 9, 1999 – May 6, 2000); and "Justice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk" at the Spertus Museum in Chicago (August 16, 1998 – February 28, 1999). "Justice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk" is also a traveling exhibition of The Arthur Szyk Society. Recent major publications about the art of Arthur Szyk include a new edition of The Szyk Haggadah and its Companion Volume Freedom Illuminated: Understanding The Szyk Haggadah; and Justice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk, produced in conjunction with the 1998-99 Spertus Museum exhibition.

In Europe, Arthur Szyk practically sank into oblivion after World War II. This is true even for his mother country Poland, where Szyk's drawings were exhibited only once after the war. That was in 2005 when the traveling exhibition "Justice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk" was brought from The Arthur Szyk Society in the United States and presented at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Izrael Poznański Palace in Łódź and the Judaica Foundation - Center For Jewish Culture in Kraków. The biggest exhibition of Szyk's art on the European Continent after the war was staged at the German Historical Museum in Berlin from August 2008 to January 2009; later, in 2009, it was also shown at the German Museum of Caricature and Drawings, Wilhelm Busch in Hanover.