I didn’t know who Esphyr Slobodkina was the first time I saw her, but her striking appearance and demeanor caught my attention. She was dressed in an ankle-length black jumper, black stockings and Mary Jane shoes with her long white hair in a neat bun.

It was 1994 at the University of Hartford’s Hillel Theater and 83-year old Slobodkina resembled a demure turn-of-the-century lady, though her unbridled mannerisms were far from Victorian. Wearing a determined and frustrated expression, she wielded her cane like a police baton while barking clipped commands at stagehands as they wrestled a herd of five-year-old children into monkey costumes.

Engrossed by the spectacle, I immediately wished to know more about this woman.

A short time later, I applied for a job as a composer to score plays for a well-known artist and celebrated children’s author. To my surprise, the intriguing figure from the children’s theater was the person who greeted me on the evening of my audition. As I folded my lanky 6’4” frame into a chair, Esphyr Slobodkina remarked in her strong Russian accent, “Well, you’re no beauty, but you’ve got something.”

The innuendo of her audacious introduction was not lost on me; my height intimidates many people, and I recognized the parry for dominance. Thus began our professional relationship and eventual friendship—which took us from Hartford, Connecticut to Glen Head, New York, and spanned nearly eight years.

 Esphyr always delighted in talking to me about her life experiences. Self-educated and well spoken, she entwined stories of history, fashion, family, and her passion for art. Her memory for detail and anecdotal ability was astonishing.

Esphyr easily recalled details of her childhood in Chelyabinsk, her family’s upheavals during the Russian Revolution, her journey to the United States, and the Great Depression. She captivated me with vivid descriptions of the artistic landscape of the 1930’s and 40’s as she shared her personal and—sometimes not too flattering—opinions about the personalities and tempers of the American Abstract Artists members and casual acquaintances from the New York art scene.

The following pages offer an intimate look at Esphyr’s personal life, as recounted in her autobiography and as told to me throughout our years together.

In the beginning, I served as her composer and personal assistant. By the end I was her caregiver, confidant, and friend. Ambitious, determined, and unwavering in her convictions, Esphyr Slobodkina was a forceful personality who actively shaped every aspect of her life and her legacy.

My hope is that these reminiscences and selections from her autobiography will offer some insight into her unique character.

* * *

Esphyr Slobodkina was born to Itta L’Vovna Agranovich Slobodkina and Solomon Aronovich Slobodkin[i] on September 22, 1908, the youngest of five children in a loving upper middle class family in Chelyabinsk, Russia. Esphyr loved her mother and father dearly, describing them as demanding yet kind people who wanted the best for their children. She attributed her own stoic temperament to the forbearance of this educated and hard-working couple.

Esphyr’s father had been a private tutor, but opportunity and ambition led to a management position with the MAZUT oil refinery. Esphyr’s mother declined a high school scholarship to pursue her passion: couture dressmaking. Both parents were driven to succeed and instilled this same ambition in Esphyr at an early age.

She often recounted the following childhood incident, which aptly captures the Slobodkin family work ethic:

One rainy morning I found myself in the dining room alone with Mother. “Mama, I am bored.” Mama pays no attention. I look at the rain-streaked window panes and begin again: “Mama, it is so boring.” Mama continues to sew a long, straight seam. “Mama, I am so bored.” Suddenly, Mama – my Mama who never, ever hit me in my whole life – turns briskly and plants a resounding slap on my pale little cheek. “Bored? Nonsense! Go find something to do, and you’ll soon stop being bored!” she roars in her magnificent mezzo-soprano. I am stunned, but I obey. I find something to do, and boredom is gone, not only for that day but forever. Never in my life have I been bored again. And if ever boredom threatens to appear, I quickly find something to keep my hands busy, and it invariably disappears. [ii]

This industrious spirit characterized the Slobokin family’s existence, but the family never lacked for joy. Esphyr’s home life in the small Siberian town was “one of governesses and cooks…and a great variety of people my father’s job and his gregarious disposition brought into our lives… Good food, plenty of music, light discreet flirtations, and much serious talk were the order of the day.”[iii]

Punctuating Esphyr’s early years were moments of tragedy and hardship. Her eldest brother, Yasha, succumbed to rheumatic fever at age 11. With great clarity, Esphyr recalled her mother’s mournful wails as Yasha lay on his deathbed. Stricken with grief, Esphyr’s mother fell ill for many months and was sent to Crimea to recuperate.

A few years later, the outbreak of the Russian Revolution presented new challenges. In 1919, due to escalating violence, Esphyr’s father decided to relocate his family. He arranged for an old hospital railroad car to be converted into passenger accommodations for five families and bribed the military for transport to Vladivostok.[iv] From there, the Slobodkins planned to catch a British ship to England and make their way to Palestine.

Shortly after arriving in Vladivostok, the Russian Empire crumbled and the ruble became valueless, rendering the Slobodkin family virtually penniless. Esphyr describes her parents’ reaction to this devastating turn of events:

One day, paler than any man I have ever seen, Father walked into our suburban apartment, sat down on a chair…and in a half-choked voice said: “We are completely wiped out…The ruble is worthless.” “What is done, is done,” was Mother’s reply. “Let’s see what can be done now.”[v]

Itta’s determined spirit and calm in the face of crisis profoundly impacted Esphyr, who would carry this sense of indomitable resolution throughout her life.

Stranded on the far edge of Russia with very little money, the family sold their few remaining jewels and moved from their luxurious apartment to a small rental house. Esphyr’s father found part-time work on the railroad and when he was paid it was only in available dry goods. Her mother began a small sewing business.

Esphyr learned the trade, demonstrating an innate flair for fashion. Although still quite young at 12 years old, she was skilled at creating embroidery designs, and clients often sought her opinions on various styles and adornments.

Tying bows, arranging loops, making up designs for the embroidery gradually became my specialty. With increasing frequency I was being called in to give my opinion of this or that detail. It was amusing because I was still so young but the ladies liked it, and I wasn’t too shy to speak my mind.[vi]

Because money was scarce in the seaport town, it was decided that Esphyr and her sister, Tamara, would relocate with their mother across the border to China to seek out wealthier clientele. The three settled in Harbin, Manchuria, in 1921.

The move coincided with the Slobodkina sisters’ progression to higher education. They attended the Second Realnoye Uchilische, a junior high school that stressed mathematics and art and prepared students for engineering degrees. Esphyr found herself drawn to architectural studies, an interest that greatly influenced her later artistic development.

Due to its strategic position on the newly completed transcontinental railway line, Harbin’s cultural development in the early 20^th century was swift and expansive. By 1923, the city was immersed in all aspects of the Russian arts.

Esphyr’s world and the economy in general began to improve. As home to several thousand nationals from 33 countries, Harbin provided exposure to diverse cultures through the arts, the popular press, and theater.

Esphyr absorbed, then modified, everything she saw, attending fashion balls dressed in costumes of her own design and creating innovative accessories for garments at her mother’s shop. [Fig. 36] She excelled in her art classes, and in 1927 Esphyr graduated from high school as a well-rounded and confident young lady.

Seeking opportunity and experience, Esphyr Slobodkina left for America via steamship in January, 1928. She was 19 years old. Her brother Ronya, who had emigrated to the United States earlier, secured her passage through an art student visa. Recounting her first impressions of the New World, Esphyr writes:

As if bent upon crushing every preconceived idea I might have had about New York City, the weather provided us with a record snowfall. The city we drove through was wedding-day white, enchanted-palace quiet. To add to my happy bewilderment, the streets were broad, with no sign of the ugly skyscrapers or stone canyons everybody assured me I shall have to live with in New York. And the final, glorious surprise: The apartment…was only half a block away from the eastern rim of Central Park. I fell in love with New York — immediately, irrevocably.[vii]

Due to language confusion, Ronya inadvertently enrolled his sister in a school for missionaries. Rather than withdraw and risk deportation, Esphyr stayed registered as a day student and studied art in evening classes at the National Academy of Design (NAD). By this time, she had abandoned her intention to pursue architecture, finding the math too difficult. Later in life, however, she would revisit this childhood aspiration.

Esphyr corresponded with her mother and sister as frequently as 2 to 3 times a week during this first year in the United States. Often lengthy and detailed, Esphyr’s letters capture her emotional experience and the state of the times. Even later in life, the penned letter always remained Esphyr’s primary method of communication. Her accounts were colorful, her opinions frank, and her scathing criticisms unbridled. The following epistolary excerpt records her acerbic observations of New York life.

Through these letters, one learns that Esphyr’s first year in New York was arduous but exhilarating. She fondly remembered winning first prize for her “Pearl in a Shell” costume that she created for the annual students’ ball at the National Academy of Design (Fig. 37). It was fashioned after a Chinese pearl fisherman’s dance that she had seen at a New Year’s parade in Harbin. Esphyr recalls her dramatic entrance to the ball:

I arrived in a huge, very realistic shell, and after my brother set me down in the entrance hall (hastily departing, I must add), I minced into the ballroom with just a tiny crack to see my way. When I was sure that all attention was centered on me, I slowly opened the shell and stepped out of it to a very satisfying round of applause.[ix]

When Esphyr discussed her early life in Manhattan, I could see her vibrant younger self shining through as she spoke of the special freedom for self-expression that it offered. Skilled at dressmaking and unfettered by fear of ridicule, Esphyr designed most of her own clothing and many outfits for friends and family. These garments reflected her artistic sensibility, sometimes bordering on the avant-garde.

Her dress form was her constant companion through life, a sentinel that always stood in some corner of her bedroom near the sewing machine. During the years I lived with Esphyr, I never saw it unclothed. In spare moments, she would rework an old tuxedo or thrift shop oddity into something new and amusing to wear. Even at age 89, in preparation for a reception at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Esphyr designed and constructed a wearable work of art complete with dress, coat, and hat.

Toward the end of her second year in New York, Esphyr was joined by her mother and sister just before the market crash of 1929, or as she so descriptively put it, “The Second Descent into Hell.”[x]

Not quite 21 years old, Esphyr faced the challenge of finding suitable lodgings for her family while working and attending school. Undaunted, she conceived the Slobodkina Real Estate Principle: “seek out the worst, most affordable apartment in the best location possible,”[xi] and manage the costs by subletting rooms and dividing the rent.

Esphyr firmly believed that compromise and sacrifice were the means to procurement and survival. Moving eleven times during her first decade in New York, she always managed to maintain a respectable address, living near Central Park, Riverside Drive, Sutton Place, or some obscure yet picturesque spot in Greenwich Village.

[Cat. 3] To earn a living, Esphyr sought numerous part-time jobs and willingly took on the most tedious tasks, such as assembling sample-making kits and selling handmade boudoir cushions and other artisanal items to New York City department stores. She recalls that “as Hoover’s prosperity persisted in hovering around the corner, good, steady jobs were more and more difficult to find.”[xii]

Finally, to her delight, she discovered that there were jobs for artists. Although not very creative pursuits, she managed to secure an income decorating lampshades, trays, and baskets and eventually found employment with the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program.

Despite her rigorous academic and work schedule of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Esphyr maintained an active social life. In her memoirs, she wrote extensively about her intimate relationships. She describes Ilya Young as her first, and possibly only, true romantic love. Brief and bittersweet, this relationship ended in heartache.

While recovering from this devasting breakup, Esphyr met “the very short, very brilliant, and very peculiar”[xiii] Ilya Bolotowsky. Esphyr first noticed Bolotowsky in their composition class at the National Academy of Design. She was drawn to the quality of his work and asked a classmate, who turned out to be Ilya’s sister, for an introduction. “Pretty soon, the relationship narrowed down to Ilya’s regular weekly visits to our house…one could not deny one grand and rare trait of his character: he was gloriously generous in sharing his vast knowledge of art, of history, of literature, of politics.”[xiv]

When Ilya left to study in Europe, he declared his intention to marry one of the two Slobodkina sisters upon his return. Tamara was not interested, but Esphyr’s response was different. Although she was not in love with Ilya, she realized that the marriage would be practical and fruitful from an intellectual and artistic standpoint.

She reasoned: “He was the only bright, hopeful prospect. I wasn’t in love with him…After about a year…he…proved to me that it was…idiotic…to keep going to the academy just to stay in the country when, by marrying him, I could get my American citizenship and art education in one neatly wrapped package.”[xv]

Esphyr Slobodkina married Ilya Bolotowsky when she was 24 years old. Although the relationship lacked romantic passion, Ilya became her most important art teacher. Under his mentorship, Esphyr studied all the major and minor movements of the day; they visited galleries and museums, scrutinized art magazines, and attended artist meetings and rallies. Esphyr declared Ilya responsible for her early education in abstraction.

Wedged into Esphyr’s long weeks were meetings, exhibitions, and organizational events in which she participated quietly but seriously. Young innovators of American abstract art needed a voice, and she stood with them as they came together and unionized. Esphyr was especially active in the Artist’s Union, which she joined in 1934.

Like all social movements, [the Artist’s Union] brought together a great number of people. The fear of losing the hard-fought for gains pointed in one direction — even artists had to organize to protect their interests. A Union! Of course — an Artist Union. A fellow by the name of Phil Burt (or Bart) was very active. Ben Shahn and Bryson were very cheerfully dashing about organizing practically everything. Max Spivak, in spite of his stuttering, managed to be most eloquent. Even Arshile Gorky and Stuart Davis took an active interest in the early stages of the game. The dues were small, the loft we rented huge, and the meetings, at first, tremendously popular and interesting. We worked out an ambitious program of rotating exhibitions, lectures and talks by various luminaries in the arts and allied fields and, naturally, a series of fund-raising events. In the meantime, we were meeting each other, making new friends, new connections. That is how we met Gertrude (Peter) and John (Balcomb) Greene. [xvi]

Two years later, Esphyr was among the founders of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), a group that was pivotal in providing a voice for artists working non-objectively. She remained an active member of the organization for the rest of her life.

In their third year of marriage, Ilya became involved with another woman and left. Weeks later when he returned, Esphyr set strict new rules for their marriage, informing him “you can come back, but on my terms now… We live apart.” She expresses her relief at this new found freedom:

No domestic duties for me…I was rid of his family, of the kitchen and of the damn towels, socks and shirts…In accepting Ilya on these new, well defined terms…stripped of all the superficial, irritating irrelevancies of an average marriage, this union of free, yet irrevocably intertwined souls and intellects, became the true marriage — the only kind of marriage I ever recognized as a really worthwhile entanglement between a man and a woman.[xvii]

Despite these new strictures, the couple separated in 1936 and divorced in 1938, but remained close friends for a few more years. Esphyr, now unencumbered, outgrew the need for her mentor and truly matured as a painter, finding her own form of artistic expression. The winter of 1936-37 was a seminal period in her creative development. “I began to concentrate more and more seriously on painting in the abstract, though I never gave up the pleasure of the more emotional, more direct self-expression in still life and landscape painting. The immediate events…called for concentration, for rapid development and achievement in the abstract field.”[xviii]

As she continued to mature artistically, Esphyr simultaneously sought work that would provide immediate income. In 1937, at age 28, Esphyr accepted a job in Paterson, New Jersey, with an interesting new firm experimenting with a secret, revolutionary method of textile printing called polychrome. The job required artistic ability in fabric design and the capability to hire and fire staff.

My peculiar inclination towards ornamental design and the always evident ability to produce a firm, well-balanced composition were just what the job needed. It was messy, rather dirty and hard work but I took to it like a duck to water. The fantastic possibilities of the darn thing were mind-boggling.[xix]

Esphyr demanded $15 a week (an exorbitant salary for a woman at that time) and got it. The lengthy commute from Manhattan made her late for many of the artists’ meetings, but the job brought financial security for nearly three years.

In this same year Esphyr met Johnny J., a love interest she described as “a penny in a dime suit… he was always there seemingly intent on nothing else but amusing me.”[xx]

Associated with various New York socialites and literati, Johnny presented Esphyr with a life-changing opportunity when he introduced her to children’s book author, Margaret Wise Brown. In preparation for an interview with Brown, Esphyr considered her artistic options and settled on innovative collage illustrations of her own children’s book called Mary and the Poodies. Brown and her publisher found Esphyr’s abstract collage style refreshing and new, and subsequently hired her to illustrate The Little Fireman (1938). The book was a critical and popular success.

The outcome of this first literary enterprise was an association that blossomed into friendship. Keen on social networking and confident of her rightful place in society, Esphyr was delighted to summer at Margaret’s cottage in Maine in 1939 and 1940 where she would vacation with the high-society guests that frequented the island. Slobodkina captures the bohemian and sometimes risqué attitude that permeated island life as she recalls an island-hopping excursion from the main cottage:

We had an amusing time playing out a charade of harem girls, minus the master. We sun-bathed, swam au naturel and took nude pictures, which we had great difficulty in having printed. Too bad they were not in color — we must have made quite a pleasing assortment beginning with blond Betty, to Strawberry-red Beulah, brown-haired me and jet-black, white-skinned Leslie.[xxi]

At mealtimes, philosophical and thought-provoking discussions were spearheaded by Brown. Esphyr and Margaret were like-minded in their opinionated temperaments, if not always their views. A mutual respect developed, and Margaret embraced Esphyr as her confidant.

Life with Margaret was exhilarating, deeply sentimental, enlightening, and all too brief. Their friendship and book collaboration continued until Margaret’s untimely death in 1952. Esphyr eventually penned and illustrated fifteen of her own children’s books including the classic Caps for Sale.

Just as Esphyr’s illustration career began to take off, tragedy struck when her father unexpectedly passed away. It was 1938. Once again, Esphyr faced the task of caring for her mother. “The death of my father brought great changes into my life. As the only unattached child, I was quite naturally expected to pool my resources with my mother’s and to provide a home, consolation, and companionship for my bereaved parent.”[xxii]

Mother and daughter moved into a “charming apartment on the third floor of a brownstone building on 60^th Street between Park and Lexington.” After a period of grieving, Esphyr began hosting gatherings in her new space and soon became chairman of the American Abstract Artists entertainment committee. At these parties one could find art world luminaries and various figures from the publishing world.

At first, our guests were our personal and business friends – Margaret [Wise Brown], Charles Shaw, Suzy and George [L.K.] Morris, Gallatin, and my editors of the moment were all among our visitors. When in the late thirties and early forties the first waves of intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria began to reach New York, the American Abstract Artists…decided to welcome them into the artists’ community. I was unanimously elected as chairman of the entertainment committee…In our Sixtieth Street apartment we gave parties: for as many as one hundred people with a lavish buffet supper and an abstract movie by Man Ray for entertainment; a more intimate reception and an afternoon tea for Mondrian; and a few little dinners for visiting celebrities and their wives. It was fun, it was exciting, and I suppose it did no harm to my career.[xxiii]

Esphyr continued to produce and exhibit art at a feverish pace, but soon found herself making time for a new romance. At a 1942 American Abstract Artists exhibition, she met her second husband, William L. Urquhart. Drawn to his intellect, good looks, and old-fashioned manners, he became a friend, employer, and secret lover. After the death of William’s wife, Esphyr and he were married. Tragically, William, 20 years Esphyr’s senior, died in their third year of marriage in 1963.

With the income from her various jobs, small royalties from the books, an occasional sale of art, and still using the Slobodkina Real Estate Principle, Esphyr sublet her 60th Street apartment and purchased her first home in Great Neck, New York in 1948. At age 40, she was finally afforded the opportunity to experiment with architectural and interior design.

The Great Neck residence was an unusual structure, fitted into the side of a hill. Armed with a vision to improve the allotment of studio space, Esphyr hired an open-minded contractor willing to work with her blueprint. For two years she prevailed upon the town for permission to execute her plans.

Eventually, Esphyr begrudgingly compromised her design, and the project was allowed to begin. The contractor enclosed half of an exterior concrete slab that ran along the backside of the building, moving windows, doors, and a staircase to achieve the desired results. The newly enclosed space became a 17 x 25 foot studio – a large, well-lit room that enabled Esphyr to produce larger-scale artworks. Interior renovations were done almost exclusively by Esphyr, including all floor staining. She covered the walls with vibrant paints such as rich plum, or deep green, and even reconstructed the furniture to suit her aesthetic sensibility.

Slobodkina’s elegantly decorated bedroom in her Great Neck house, ca. 1950. Friends often commented that Slobodkina would “Esphyrize” every space she inhabited. Indeed, the artist always remodeled, redesigned, and rearranged her environment to suit her particular aesthetic sensibilities. Rather than purchase expensive furniture,

I went quite exotic…Some of the walls, the door and the floor were painted dark, bluish green. The west wall, the ceiling, the trim and part of the east wall with its rather large picture window, were painted white. The remaining walls were covered in a striking paper of broad gold-and-white stripe – very stark, yet very Empire. A border of the same paper ran around the edge of the ceiling in two oblongs with perfectly mitered corners…all the furniture, including a tremendously tall pier glass mirror, was painted white. Longing for a fireplace I could not afford, I built an artificial one under the mirror, with the help of some left-over bricks and one of the office electric heaters. Most of the furniture was white, but not the bed. Now, the bed was a fun piece…I bought a really old-fashioned sleigh bed…and since my bedroom was long and narrow, the bed had to be cut down. I did not want just a bed-I wanted a couch in the Greco-Roman, Empire interpretation. So I took the sleigh bed which looked like this:

Then I painted it the same mat-finish dark green of the walls, gave it a gold moiré bedspread and a round tasseled bolster, placed the…white fur rug alongside it, and voila! – a real Empire bit…The same gold moiré was used for the drapery which framed the sheer white curtains.[xxiv]

Bolstered by the success of the renovations, Esphyr designed and oversaw the construction of a house for Tamara in 1967. Still standing today, the house echoes the clean geometries and formal simplicity of her paintings.

Esphyr and her mother lived in Great Neck for 30 years.

Exterior and interior views of the house that Slobodkina designed for her sister in Great Neck, New York, ca. 1972.

Tamara eventually moved to Florida, but when her husband died the family was once again reunited. In 1979, Esphyr sold her house and moved with her mother to Hallandale, Florida to be near her grieving sister.

Esphyr soon became an active participant in the Florida arts and cultural scene. She exhibited her art, lectured on her children’s books, and taught doll-making classes, one of her many pastimes.

While in Hallandale, just months before her mother passed away at age 98, Esphyr had an exhibition at the Hollywood Art Museum. She placed one of her mother’s paintings in the show. (Her mother had begun studying art under her daughter’s tutelage 23 years before.) The inscription that Esphyr placed by the painting attests to their special relationship: “She was my best student in art, and my best teacher in life.”

The years surrounding Esphyr’s move to Florida were among her most emotionally challenging. While still grieving the death of her husband and mother, Esphyr lost her brother, a favorite cousin, her aunt, and long-time friends George L.K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, and Alice Mason among others.

To cope with a deep and mounting depression, Esphyr began compiling her Notes for a Biographer. This 1,100-page autobiography, which Esphyr painstakingly retyped many times, offers a chronicle of the Slobodkin family from the late 19^th century through 1983.

It includes vivid depictions of the mood of each decade through Esphyr’s artistic eye, correspondence containing intimate commentary on friends, lovers, and contemporaries, and tidbits of stories, gossip, and recipes. In typical fashion, Esphyr dealt with her emotional crisis through the panacea of work.

By the end of 1991, Esphyr Slobodkina, 83, and Tamara, 85, relocated to West Hartford, Connecticut so that Esphyr could oversee the construction of the Slobodkina/Urquhart Children’s Reading Room – a building she funded and designed for the University of Hartford (William’s alma mater).

Esphyr decorated the interior with 26 paper and cloth collage murals that recreate illustrations from her first children’s book, Mary and the Poodies. During this period, Esphyr began to think about her legacy, actively seeking homes for “her babies” (as she referred to her artworks) that were not yet with collectors or museums. Negotiations began with the Hillwood Art Museum and the Heckscher Museum of Art, both in New York. Each institution now owns a substantial collection of her art and archives.

Esphyr revisited the Slobodkina Real Estate Principle one last time when she, Tamara, and I moved to a house in Glen Head, New York in January 1999. There, Esphyr established the non-profit Slobodkina Foundation, an organization that would offer educational children’s programs, art tours, and archival resources for researchers.

Esphyr lived her remaining years freely and fully, hosting numerous parties and overnight get-togethers with close friends, and entertaining family and the hundreds of guests who came to the Slobodkina House to meet the legend and enjoy her art.

Esphyr continued to produce art until shortly before her death on July 22, 2002. She is remembered for her unconventional artistry and independent disposition, which places her ineluctably among the female pioneers of the 20th century.

Introduction

Esphyr Slobodkina was a pioneer of American abstract art. In the 1930s and early 1940s, she helped to translate the work of the European modernists into an American idiom. Like her colleagues, she joined the Artists’ Union, the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), and the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group. As an advocate of abstract art, she participated in the avant-garde activities and exhibitions that helped to achieve recognition for abstract art in the United States before World War II.

Exceptionally inventive, Slobodkina focused on painting in the 1930s and 1940s, but she also applied her talent to many areas, from writing and illustrating children’s books—her acclaimed book Caps for Sale was published in 1940—to constructing sculpture from found objects. She designed buildings, murals, decorative arts, and even textiles and couture clothing.

Strong willed and independent, Slobodkina rejected Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, calling it “the drip, splash, and smudge school.¹” She continued on her own path, although Abstract Expressionism dominated American art throughout the decade. Later, with the development of hard-edge painting during the 1960s and the 1970s, she was among the artists who were viewed as early forerunners of this movement.

Slobodkina was rediscovered as a pioneer of American abstract art in the 1980s, and her paintings were exhibited in the landmark show Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927-1944, which opened in 1983 at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1984 ². During the 1980s and the 1990s, her work was increasingly recognized, acquired by important collectors, and exhibited in major museums ³. This essay redefines her role in American art, documenting the importance of her early contributions, her later development, and the recognition she received in the last decade of her life ⁴.

From Siberia to New York City

Born in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, on September 22, 1908, Esphyr Slobodkina was the daughter of the manager of a MAZUT oil branch ⁵. Displaced during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, Esphyr left Russia with her mother and sister Tamara in 1920. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, they followed other prosperous Russians to Harbin, Manchuria, where her mother established a dressmaking salon. In 1922, they were joined by the rest of the family. Planning to become an architect, Esphyr attended a preparatory school for engineering and architectural programs, where her studies included mechanical drawing. She had learned to paint from a private tutor, the Impressionist painter Pavel Goost ⁶. Her painting Park Bench in Harbin, c. 1927, shows her ability to create the small, quickly painted brush strokes and reflected light characteristic of Impressionism.

After graduating from the First Harbin Public Commercial School, Slobodkina decided to leave Harbin and join her brother Ronya, who had immigrated to the United States in 1923. In 1928, Esphyr, with a student visa, traveled to New York City to study art.

The National Academy of Design

From 1928 to 1933, Slobodkina studied at the National Academy of Design. Both she and her sister Tamara (who also attended the academy) hated “every minute of its stupefying, senseless, destructive method of ‘teaching’ art ⁷.” Slobodkina qualified her judgment of the academy by making an exception for Arthur Sinclair Covey’s composition class: “We both loved Mr. Covey, and as we learned his particular method of picture organization, he appreciated our work ⁸.”

Slobodkina had noticed the work of another student, Ilya Bolotowsky, displayed in her composition class ⁹, but she didn’t meet this young artist until 1931, after he had finished his studies at the academy. The two artists were introduced by his sister, Myrrah Bolotowsky, who also studied at the National Academy.

Like Slobodkina, Ilya Bolotowsky was a Russian immigrant, but he had arrived in New York City in 1923, five years before Slobodkina. Attending the National Academy of Design from 1924 until 1930, Bolotowsky studied primarily with Ivan Olinsky, who taught life drawing classes. However, he agreed with Slobodkina’s assessment of the National Academy:

“I always thought it was a very bad school. Now, as I look back on it, it had some advantages. The teachers were extremely academic, although Olinsky was not; he was sort of a modernist . . . We were warned not to follow people like Picasso, Cézanne and such like because Picasso never learned how to draw and Cézanne never learned how to paint, and other advice of this nature ¹⁰.”

The Walking Encyclopedia

To complete his education, Bolotowsky traveled to Europe to study the work of the old masters and the European modernists. When he returned in October 1932, he visited Esphyr and showed her reproductions of the paintings that he had seen ¹¹. Intrigued with his knowledge, she concluded that “Here, at last, was a concrete chance to really learn something about the technique, the meaning, the history of painting. . . . Here in this walking encyclopedia of carefully selected, highly pertinent knowledge lay the solution to my quest for pure knowledge, for practical information, for plain, human encouragement ¹².”

Frustrated with the academic program at the National Academy, she asked Bolotowsky if he would teach her how to paint ¹³. Beginning with a lecture on composition, Bolotowsky became her mentor. He stressed the organization of a painting—its form, color, and space—and illustrated his points with examples from old masters as well as modern artists ¹⁴. The following week, he was impressed to see that she had understood his lesson and produced a painting ¹⁵.

Slobodkina and Bolotowsky developed a close personal and professional relationship as they discussed art, visited other artists, and went to see many exhibitions. Visiting Bolotowsky’s friends, like the painter Byron Browne (then known as George Brown), Slobodkina learned both practical and theoretical information. She heard advice about art materials, comparisons of the work of Gauguin and van Gogh, and discussions of Picasso’s various styles as well as Cézanne’s method of building form with small brush strokes and Matisse’s use of line and color ¹⁶.

Slobodkina remembered these social evenings: “For me it was all heady, new stuff. I spent entire evenings without once uttering a word, except to say thank you when handed a cup of tea with a piece of cake ¹⁷.” She noted that “everybody was still learning from the Masters” and “by . . . keeping my mouth tightly shut, my eyes wide open, and my ears thoroughly attuned to every bit of information which came my way, I managed to learn a great deal in a very short time ¹⁸.”

Esphyr and Ilya spent the summer of 1933 on a farm near High Bridge, New Jersey, with the Bolotowsky family. During the summer, she and Bolotowsky “prepared canvasses, we ground our own paint, and we painted everything, and everybody around us ¹⁹.” When Esphyr painted the interior of her bedroom, Ilya stood in front of this painting and said, “Hm . . .,” but nothing more ²⁰.

“Now You Can Call Yourself an Artist”

By the end of the summer, they were married. Although she had hesitated to give up her “freedom,” Bolotowsky had pointed out the practical advantages of formalizing their relationship: she could legalize her presence in the United States, become a citizen, and quit attending the National Academy of Design ²¹. As a woman, Slobodkina had, in fact, chosen a traditional method of becoming an artist: she learned her profession from her husband ²².

In 1934 – probably when Esphyr and Ilya were on vacation in Noank, Connecticut – she painted a still life with buttercups ²³. Bolotowsky was impressed with her progress and declared, “Now you can call yourself an artist ²⁴.” Considering her education complete, Slobodkina noted that “Never again did he give me any advice or criticize my paintings ²⁵.”

Yaddo Artist Colony

In the autumn of 1934, Slobodkina and Bolotowsky were both awarded Yaddo Foundation Fellowships, which provided room, board, and studio space at Saratoga Springs, New York, for artists, writers, and composers ²⁶.  At Yaddo, Bolotowsky experimented with several different styles, painting realistic landscapes and semi-abstractions. He even tried rudimentary abstraction ²⁷.

Slobodkina, preferring interiors, chose to paint the studio stove, a still life with water lilies, a bathroom with water lilies floating in the sink, and John Cheever’s Yaddo studio. These paintings reflect her exploration of Post-Impressionism: her painting of the bathroom, with its intense colors and distorted perspective, recalls Vincent van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles ²⁸.

Challenged by Cubism

During the 1930s, most young, American modernists were challenged by Cubism, especially the work of Pablo Picasso, who with his colleague Georges Braque, had analyzed “nature” and restructured the “reality” of the painted surface. Bolotowsky undoubtedly took Slobodkina to see European and American modernism at Albert E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art, which had opened at New York University in 1927 ²⁹. By 1933, when he was tutoring her, the collection of the Gallery of Living Art had grown large enough to present a selection of art from Cézanne up to Cubism, Constructivism, and De Stijl ³⁰. The examples of Cubism in Gallatin’s collection in 1933 provided a comprehensive survey for artists to study ³¹.

Slobodkina, too, experimented with Cubism, particularly the work of Juan Gris ³². Slobodkina would have seen Gris’s painting when she first visited Gallatin’s gallery. Juan Gris’s work, in fact, had appeared in the inaugural exhibition of the Gallery of Living Art in 1927, and although he was already a well-known artist, this was Gris’s “debut in an American museum ³³.”

Slobodkina described her first Cubist painting, The Sink, c. 1935, as a “fractured image of the sink in the little Clifton ^{New Jersey} bathroom. It was quite a breakthrough for me, on my own ³⁴.” Slobodkina found that Juan Gris’s visual analysis of an object was easy to understand:

The planes he stacks one behind the other are a perfect illustration of the so-called “harmonical space”. The circles he places at the spot where the top or the bottom of a bottle or of a wine glass should be go right along with the theory of enclosure of the space which is presumably occupied by the object. The simultaneous showing of the front, profile, and the back of the object is practically the de rigueur feature of every self-respecting cubist painting, collage, drawing or sculpture, expressing the idea that an object should be viewed not only from one position, but so to speak, “in the round ³⁵.”

Slobodkina understood how to learn from the masters, but she also knew that originality was essential: “It took great men like Braque and Picasso first to make the rules, and then calmly proceed with the breaking of them for the sake of a more effective work of art ³⁶.”

By the summer of 1935, Slobodkina noted, she and Bolotowsky “were both experimenting with abstractions—he with the pure, non-objective type, I with the gradually freer and freer interpretation of the Cubist theory ³⁷.” 

Slobodkina’s painting The Pot-Bellied Stove, 1935, clearly represents her understanding of Cubism: the simplified, overlapping planes of the object; the circles indicating its top and bottom; and the simultaneous presentation of its front, side, and back. In this painting, she analyzed, deconstructed, and then reassembled the stove.

The American Avant-Garde in the 1930s: the Artists’ Union, the WPA/FAP, and the AAA

During the mid-1930s, at the height of the Depression, Slobodkina joined the Artists’ Union, she was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) ³⁸, and she participated in the avant-garde activities of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group.

In 1934 she became an active member of the Artists’ Union, attending political rallies and picketing to create and protect government-supported jobs for artists ³⁹.

She also made posters, decorations, and costumes for special events, and she exhibited in group-sponsored exhibitions. Her 1936 painting The Angelo Herndon Petition ⁴⁰ was praised by Emily Genauer in the New York World-Telegram:

Esphyr Bolotowsky . . . is earnestly struggling to get at something, and in the near-abstraction labeled “The Angelo Herndon Petition” she nearly arrives. The thing is still disjointed. But there are elements like the vertical use of reds in the design, the red banner overhead serving to unify the canvas, and the tensions and repetition of certain motifs, which definitely indicate an attempt to achieve plastically ordered form ⁴¹.

Established during the Depression as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to combat unemployment, the WPA/FAP included artists in a nationwide federal relief program. Because the WPA/FAP did not allow married artists to work in the program at the same time, Slobodkina—who was separated from her husband by the summer of 1936—registered for Home Relief in her maiden name ⁴². When she was hired by the WPA/FAP, she was assigned to assist the artist Hananiah Harari. However, she came to his studio only to sign in; he preferred to work alone.

By 1938, Slobodkina had produced five mural sketches. Describing her sketches, she explained that “the idea . . . was to create . . . a continuous chain of interlocking shapes to produce an effect of a single unit ⁴³.” The paintings of Joan Miró also influenced her mural sketches, freeing her “from the obligation of being completely flat and completely geometric ⁴⁴.”

Although Slobodkina and Bolotowsky were divorced in 1938, they continued their relationship as colleagues and friends for another decade. His 1936–1937 mural studies for the Williamsburg Housing Project served as a model for her own mural sketches. With a combination of biomorphic and geometric forms and converging, diagonal lines, her sketches dated approximately 1938 recall Bolotowsky’s mural as well as the work of Miró. She later recalled, “As at that time I was still very close . . . with Ilya, I . . . suspect that his endless chatter about an ideal design he hoped to produce for his mural had some influence on my composition ⁴⁵.”

The discussions among abstract artists who worked on the WPA/FAP continued informally at the studio of sculptor Ibram Lassaw and then led to the formation of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936. Ilya Bolotowsky and Esphyr Slobodkina attended an early meeting of the new organization at Harry Holtzman’s studio in November 1936 ⁴⁶. Bolotowsky advised Slobodkina to join the group. They both became charter members ⁴⁷ and participated in its first exhibition at the Squibb Gallery in New York City in April 1937.

Slobodkina exhibited two Cubist paintings in the first AAA exhibition—Still Life with Chair and The Pot-Bellied Stove—both dazzling works with simplified forms and bold colors ⁴⁸. Slobodkina also created a lithograph on a zinc plate for the portfolio that 30 of the group’s 39 members printed to document their exhibition (Untitled, American Abstract Artists Portfolio, 1937, Lithograph, 12″ x 9¼”).

With its flat planes and circular forms, her print was closely related to her painting The Pot-Bellied Stove; although in the black-and-white print, she used parallel lines and cross-hatching to create tone. When Bolotowsky saw her print, he exclaimed, “I cannot understand how you do it! Whatever you undertake, you do it completely professionally, even if it is for the first time you touch it! ⁴⁹”

Fighting for Abstract Art in the 1930s

Although more than 1,500 viewers attended the first AAA exhibition generating public attention ⁵⁰, the show was attacked by critics. In the 1930s, most curators and art critics considered the work of American abstract artists too derivative of European styles of painting. Some conservative critics even concluded that art influenced by European artists was “un-American” ⁵¹; other critics dismissed all abstract art as merely decorative ⁵². The Depression and other economic and political events of the late 1920s and early 1930s had turned the attention of the art establishment away from modernism toward a new regionalism, fostering an interest in art that celebrated the American experience.

In a review of the first AAA exhibition, New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell attacked the quality of the show, dismissing abstract work as a “mass demonstration of decorative design ⁵³.” However, despite negative opinions about abstract art, some artists did receive limited praise. Jerome Klein, in a New York Post review, noted Slobodkina’s paintings, including them among “some of the most interesting” work in the show ⁵⁴.

Nevertheless, Jerome Klein also used sarcasm to criticize abstract art: he titled his review of the 1938 AAA exhibition “Plenty of Duds Found in Abstract Art Show.” His advice to the viewer revealed his scorn: “Very well, poke among the droppings of modern art, pick yourself a dry bone and suck on it. See what you get ⁵⁵.”

The next year, in 1939, Edward Alden Jewell was even more critical; he made no attempt to hide his hostility to abstract art. In his review of the AAA show at the Riverside Museum, he concluded that “when they do not perhaps exactly exalt, they make their little decorative dingbats turn the very neatest of handsprings ⁵⁶.”

Challenging these critics in a battle that would help prepare the way for the success of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the AAA served as a forum for the debate about abstract art. When its group exhibitions became targets for the most vicious criticism, members fought back by publishing pamphlets and catalogs that defended abstract art. They produced a twelve-page pamphlet that criticized prominent art critics: The Art Critics—! How Do They Serve the Public? What Do They Say? How Much Do They Know? Let’s Look at the Record! 

This pamphlet was handed out at the AAA’s annual exhibition in June 1940. It quoted the critics and attacked them for the contradictions in their statements about abstract art. AAA artists had even organized a public protest, picketing the Museum of Modern Art (on April 15, 1940) and distributing pamphlets designed by Ad Reinhardt that queried, “How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art?”

The Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929, particularly angered the young American abstract artists with its contradictory policy of promoting European abstract movements while at the same time endorsing American social realism and regionalism. Although the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in 1931, included a few abstract artists in such shows as the 1936 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, the Whitney also focused primarily on American realism ⁵⁷.

Another New York museum, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which was founded a decade later, in 1939, proved to be more supportive of American abstract artists. Later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, this museum, directed by Hilla Rebay, not only featured the painting of Vasily Kandinsky and the abstract work of European artists but also began to include the work of some Americans. In addition, Rebay provided financial support from the foundation to American artists working in a non-objective style. Esphyr Slobodkina, who had been represented at the museum ⁵⁸, received a stipend for art supplies in 1940 ⁵⁹.

World War II Changes the Artistic Landscape

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s, the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and the occupation of Paris in 1940 brought significant changes: approximately 700 artists and 380 architects arrived in the United States between 1933 and 1944 ⁶⁰. Many of these artist-émigrés settled in New York City, creating an international dialogue for American artists. The prestige of the European modernists also focused attention on abstract art and served to validate the work of the American artists who admired them. Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Fritz Glarner, Hans Richter, Fernand Léger, and Piet Mondrian were refugees who became members of the AAA.

With the help of AAA member Harry Holtzman, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian arrived in New York in October 1940 and joined the AAA three months later. In his Neo-Plastic paintings, Mondrian constructed a dynamic equilibrium using straight lines, rectangular shapes, and primary colors. His growing influence on the work of several group members (even before his arrival in New York) helped to transform the fourth annual exhibition enough that critic Jerome Klein would call the AAA “the national organization of adherents to squares, circles and unchecked flourishes ⁶¹.” Klein mentioned Slobodkina in this review, naming her one of the artists to be noted ⁶².

Slobodkina organized two parties at her apartment to honor Mondrian: a reception and a tea sponsored by the AAA ⁶³. Although she never adopted a Neo-Plastic vocabulary as did numerous other AAA members ⁶⁴, her work in the 1940s became increasingly geometric. However, curved edges often defined the irregular geometric forms that dominated Slobodkina’s work during this decade. 

Ovals in the Sunset (Sketch) and Monochrome in Gray, both painted in 1942, capture Mondrian’s concept of dynamic equilibrium without repeating his rectangular shapes or adhering to his primary colors. Instead, she challenged his prohibition of arbitrary contours, creating an inventive array of overlapping forms.

Abstract Art Gains Stature in the 1940s

In 1942, the AAA members could boast of an impressive group of abstract artists, including Mondrian, Hélion, Léger, and Moholy-Nagy, who participated in the AAA’s sixth annual exhibition. Although critic Edward Alden Jewell continued to complain about the lack of “striking creative originality” in the work of the Americans, his review did give them credit for “consolidation of more general gains” and mentioned the inclusion of the prominent European artists ⁶⁵. Jewell’s tone, which was definitely less critical, indicated the growing acceptance of abstract art in the 1940s.

Signaling this change, critic Clement Greenberg wrote a pivotal review of the sixth annual exhibition in The Nation. Greenberg, who, unlike Jewell, enthusiastically supported abstract art and would later become the champion of Abstract Expressionism, praised the work of Esphyr Slobodkina, Hananiah Harari, and Giorgio Cavallon ⁶⁶. He selected their paintings as the best in the show, emphasizing that “they had in common a fluidity of shape and color that seemed least to violate the character of their medium, in contrast to the ‘geometricians,’ who treat canvas as though it were concrete or plastic ⁶⁷.”

Greenberg described this AAA show as “the most provocative” of four abstract shows he had seen, but he qualified his praise by adding that this was “not so much because of the merits of the individual contributors as because many of them were comparatively young and so could tell us most about the probable future of abstract art in this country ⁶⁸.”

Years later, in 1984, Greenberg, who became one of the most important critics of the 20th century, admitted “how arrogant his attitude had been when he reviewed the AAA shows ⁶⁹.” When he reconsidered his evaluation of the AAA, he confessed that “his eye in the 1930s wasn’t up to the quality of the AAA shows ⁷⁰.”

Slobodkina’s Work Gains Attention in the 1940s

During the 1940s, Slobodkina developed a mature abstract style and an impressive exhibition record for a young artist. As an active member of the AAA, she continued to exhibit her work in the group’s annual shows and participate in the abstract avant-garde in New York during the war years. She became the group’s assistant treasurer in 1942 and served as its secretary from 1945 until about 1960. (Later, in 1963, she was elected president, and she remained a member throughout her life.)

A. E. Gallatin organized Slobodkina’s first major one-person exhibition at his Museum of Living Art in 1942 ⁷¹.  Although other AAA members had been included in group shows at Gallatin’s museum, hers was one of the few exhibitions that featured the work of a single artist ⁷². In a review of her exhibition, critic Henry McBride applauded her accomplishments as “a painter of the abstract, who has refinement, good color, and a sense of picture-making among her assets ⁷³.”

In 1940, Gallatin, also a member of the AAA, had won a painting of Slobodkina’s in 1940 at the group’s raffle held to help members Albert Swinden and Balcomb Greene after a fire in their adjacent studios ⁷⁴. Gallatin had also purchased Composition, 1940, which had been exhibited in a group show at the Museum of Living Art in June–July 1942 ⁷⁵. Composition, 1940, now in the A. E. Gallatin Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a classic work by Slobodkina with its dynamic hard-edge forms and rich, vibrant colors. When Composition, 1940 was exhibited in the group show, Art News critic Rosamund Frost extolled Slobodkina’s “extremely personal forms and color sense ⁷⁶.”

While her one-person exhibition was still on view at the Museum of Living Art, Slobodkina’s work could also be seen at another important venue, Peggy Guggenheim’s famous gallery, Art of This Century, which opened in October 1942 and quickly became a meeting place for American and European artists and a center for avant-garde exhibitions. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, recommended Slobodkina for Peggy Guggenheim’s Exhibition by 31 Women. In a letter dated September 24, 1942, he suggested five “female abstract painters who on the whole seem to me as good as the best of the men in the American Abstract Artists group ⁷⁷.” Three of the five AAA artists he recommended were chosen to exhibit in the show: Susie Frelinghuysen, I. Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. (Gertrude Greene and Eleanor De Laittre were not included.)

Most of the women in the show were young, and their work was predominantly surrealist. The gallery’s press release declared that “Here then is testimony to the fact that the creative ability of women is by no means restricted to the decorative vein ⁷⁸.” The reception of the critics to this controversial show was mixed: Edward Alden Jewell wrote that “the exhibition yields one captivating surprise after another ⁷⁹.” 

But when James Stern, art critic for Time magazine, was asked to review the show, he declined, complaining that there were no first-rate female artists and that women should focus on having babies ⁸⁰. Slobodkina had mixed feelings about the concept of the show: “That was the only time I allowed myself to be in one of those sexist shows because I don’t believe in that. Why women…? As a matter of principle, I always refused to exhibit in shows like ‘Jewish art’ and ‘women painters’ or ‘older artists ⁸¹.’”

When Gallatin moved his collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Slobodkina’s painting, Composition, c. 1940, became part of a major museum collection. Installed in a prominent area near the entrance to the museum, an exhibition of the Gallatin Collection opened to the public in May 1943. Edward Alden Jewell pointed out that the art in the collection was being shown all together for the first time, which had not been possible in the smaller exhibition space at New York University ⁸². He emphasized that “the full impact of the collector’s achievement may now be experienced, and it will be remembered as one of the most significant experiences of the season ⁸³.” 

In his review, Jewell listed the many famous European artists in the collection and then the Americans (including Esphyr Slobodkina) who were represented in this prestigious collection. By supporting young American abstract artists and combining their work with the most important European modernists, Gallatin added stature to the Americans and placed them in an important historical context.

Two years later, Gallatin, with the help of curator Henry Clifford, selected paintings for another significant show, Eight by Eight: American Abstract Painting Since 1940, which opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and traveled to the Institute of Modern Art in Boston ⁸⁴. 

This exhibition featured eight paintings by eight American abstract artists—Esphyr Slobodkina, Ilya Bolotowsky, Susie Frelinghuysen, Alice Trumbull Mason, George L. K. Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Shaw, and A. E. Gallatin—and offered a view of their development over a five-year period ⁸⁵. Slobodkina’s paintings Elegy, 1936–1940 ⁸⁶, and Large Picture, 1943 ⁸⁷, were included in the show.

In Large Picture, Slobodkina repeated the fingerlike forms and dark lines that she used in Composition, c. 1940, but also established the painting’s “dynamic equilibrium” with diagonal shapes that direct the movement back and forth and with overlapping forms that advance and recede in space. The drama of this painting derives from its dynamic composition, its eccentric shapes, and its opulent color.

By 1946, Slobodkina had become well-known among abstract artists and New York art critics. When Ad Reinhardt (who had also shown his paintings in the Eight by Eight exhibition) created his cartoon tree diagramming the branches of abstract art and its break from realistic art, he created a leaf that prominently bore Slobodkina’s name.

Titled How to Look at Modern Art in America (fig. 14), Reinhardt’s vision of modern art placed Slobodkina’s leaf on the branch growing from the roots of Post-Impressionism through Cubism to the most abstract side of the tree and then branching off from Mondrian, Malevich, and Gris ⁸⁸.

When Slobodkina was featured in a one-person show at Norlyst Gallery in 1947, Edward Alden Jewell remarked that her “work in the non-objective field is extremely well known ⁸⁹.” Her exhibition at Norlyst Gallery consisted of 31 paintings, 2 collages, and 5 pieces of sculpture ⁹⁰.

In another review of the show, Art Digest critic Josephine Gibbs described Slobodkina’s paintings as “cool, thoughtful, non-objective paintings ⁹¹.” Gibbs observed that in the realm of abstract art “women more than hold their own with the men” and that “one of the best of them” was Esphyr Slobodkina ⁹². Gibbs voiced admiration for the artist’s success: “That such a large exhibition in such a circumscribed métier should be exciting, stimulating and varied rather than a trifle monotonous is sufficient testimony to the artist’s technical skill and ability to infuse these expert compositional patterns with communicated mood as well ⁹³.”

A New Avant-Garde

Despite the energy generated by the participation of European abstract artists during the war years, the AAA lost some of its vitality. Ironically, as the climate for abstract art improved and opportunities for abstract artists multiplied, the significance of the AAA declined. It had served its purpose. Attendance figures for the sixth and seventh annual exhibitions (March 1942 and March–April 1943) reflected the fading impact of the group and the competition from new galleries exhibiting contemporary abstract art. Alice Trumbull Mason’s letter to the membership on May 23, 1944, noted: “It has become apparent that, as public interest in abstract art has increased, the members have shown less and less interest in furthering the aims for which the group was founded ⁹⁴.”

Gradually, many of the group’s artists became less involved or dropped out, so that in the spring of 1947 only 14 of the original 39 founding members participated in the eleventh annual exhibition at the Riverside Museum ⁹⁵. Neither the exhibitions, nor the group itself, functioned any longer as an avant-garde force in New York City ⁹⁶. Paradoxically, the stature the AAA attained with its international membership may have reinforced the perception that the group was not “American” enough to represent the United States after World War II.

The emergence of the Eighth Street Artists’ Club (The Club) after the war rallied a larger group of artists and supplanted the AAA as a forum for abstract art. In spite of this, the remaining AAA members, including Slobodkina, continued to exhibit as a group. Philip Pavia, one of the founders of The Club, recalled the early meetings that led to its official formation in 1949: “Right after the war came the big change. . . . 1946 was the big year. It was quite noticeable, our little table at the Waldorf ^Cafeteria started to get bigger and bigger. . . . The whole breadth of avant gardism really started after the war when the refugees went home and we were on our own. We opened our club ⁹⁷.”

Other changes defined this new avant-garde: American artist Jackson Pollock painted Cathedral in 1947, dripping linear skeins of enamel and aluminum paint on his canvas, weaving a continuous pattern. Created spontaneously without any sketches, Pollock’s paintings from this period marked a new kind of abstract art, Abstract Expressionism, and critic Clement Greenberg designated Pollock “the most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one ⁹⁸.”

Slobodkina Rejects Abstract Expressionism

Mocking Abstract Expressionism as the “drip, splash, and smudge school ⁹⁹,” Esphyr Slobodkina rejected this new process of painting. Her approach to painting was not spontaneous; she resolutely continued to use flat, clearly defined geometric shapes and preconceived compositions made from enlarging preparatory drawings ¹⁰⁰. 

First, she made small sketches and even traced photographs or diagrams of machinery, which she would then work on by overlaying them with other sketches, turning them in a different direction, or simplifying their compositions ¹⁰¹. After she had completed a small drawing, she divided it into squares and enlarged it by drawing it onto a larger piece of paper with the same number of squares ¹⁰². When she finished this process, she darkened the lines on the back of the sketch with a soft pencil and transferred it to a board prepared with gesso by drawing over the lines on the front, depositing the graphite on the new surface ¹⁰³. 

Slobodkina’s carefully orchestrated compositions and her laborious working procedure contradicted the tenets of Abstract Expressionism. In addition, her selection of work for her next one-person exhibition, Tangents at the Norlyst Gallery in 1948, challenged the boundaries of “fine art” with examples from the wide range of her creative projects. She included textiles, dolls, children’s book illustrations, collages, and constructions, along with a group of still life paintings ¹⁰⁴. 

With this unconventional assortment of work, the 1948 Norlyst show marked a transition period for Slobodkina. By the autumn of 1948, she had also declared her independence from the New York art center, relocating her studio to Great Neck, New York, where she had designed and built a new house and a studio.

Not part of the postwar group of artists called the New York School ¹⁰⁵, Slobodkina did not participate in the activities and exhibitions of this new avant-garde: The Club; the landmark exhibition 9th St.: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, in 1951; or the Stable Gallery annual exhibitions from 1953 to 1957 ¹⁰⁶. Instead, sequestered in her Great Neck studio in 1950, she painted Levitator #1 and Turboprop Skyshark, two works that extended her artistic reach with their direct references to specific mechanical subjects.

Geometric and abstract, but clearly an airplane, the central image in Turboprop Skyshark fills her painting to its edges with bold, diagonal movements. The diagonal wings and propellers imply movement, and the overlapping shapes define a shallow but almost three-dimensional space. Slobodkina created the potential for flight with stark contrasts of color, which imply movement: the white and blue areas appear to advance toward the viewer, and the black and brown shapes recede into space.

Undoubtedly, designing her house and studio in Great Neck focused her attention on architecture, mechanics, and engineering, and, perhaps, her strident rejection of Abstract Expressionism motivated her to reexamine the possibilities for abstract art. When Slobodkina exhibited Turboprop Skyshark in a one-person show at the New School in 1951, a review in The Art Digest noted her increased emphasis on dynamism: “Although concise and flatly painted, the abstractions of Esphyr Slobodkina have a drama that arises from subtle use of opaque color and an intricacy of spatial effects. This drama—much of it that of the mechanical in the modern world—is evident in Turbo-Prop Sky Shark ^sic where dynamic tensions are created by an overlapping and interweaving of inventive shapes ¹⁰⁷.”

Another review, by Stuart Preston in the New York Times, applauded her as “one of the more convincing and assured abstract painters of today ¹⁰⁸.” He also emphasized the dynamic quality of her paintings:

She sets her geometrical shapes flying all over the picture surface, conveying, in their movement and in the clean-cut impact of their inter-penetrations, the dynamism that gives these designs such admirable tension. These knife-edged shapes have no body; their pure color is not altered by any transitoriness of natural light; yet, they are not flat. They advance and recede because of her ingenious play with perspective along the contours . . . ¹⁰⁹

Although Slobodkina denounced the process of the Abstract Expressionists, the dynamic quality of her own compositions—once flatter and more tightly held in equilibrium—may have been her response to their emphasis on action painting ¹¹⁰.

The Whitney Annual Exhibitions

Absent from the most avant-garde exhibitions in the 1950s, Slobodkina, nonetheless, was represented in prominent venues and continued to receive recognition from critics. Reversing its “reception” of American abstract art in the 1930s, the Whitney Museum of American Art proved to be one of the most important and inclusive venues for abstract artists during the 1950s. A broad range of artists, from those who worked in a conservative tradition to those in the vanguard, was invited by the museum curators to participate in its Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. In the catalog for the 1950 annual exhibition, museum director Hermon More wrote that “the present exhibition includes many styles and tendencies, but like its predecessors, chief emphasis has been placed on what seems to be the predominant trends in contemporary painting. If modern art in its many forms, such as expressionism, abstraction, and surrealism, predominates in the show, it is because it is the leading movement in art today, and has influenced the greatest number of younger artists ¹¹¹.”

Esphyr Slobodkina’s work was chosen for the Whitney Annual in 1950 and for annuals throughout the decade ¹¹². In 1952, her painting Composition with White Ovals, 1952 ¹¹³, was exhibited in the Whitney Annual and then purchased by the museum for its permanent collection. In a review of the work of approximately 155 artists in this Whitney Annual, critic Ralph M. Pearson selected Slobodkina’s painting as one of 16 that deserved the accolade of “top-level distinction ¹¹⁴.”

Continuing to present an inclusive survey of contemporary American painting, the 1953 Whitney Annual again provided an opportunity for Slobodkina to exhibit her work in a prestigious museum. New York Times reviewer Howard Devree noted that “as usual, the annual of contemporary American painting at the Whitney Museum covers all phases of work being done today, from ultra-realism to violent expressionism and complete abstraction ¹¹⁵.” Certainly, his description “violent expressionism” indicated Abstract Expressionism, and his category “complete abstraction” described Slobodkina’s work. Devree also placed Slobodkina’s entry, her “suggestive abstract ‘Flight,’” among the paintings he considered the “outstanding work” in the show ¹¹⁶.

Slobodkina’s Exhibition at the John Heller Gallery

The following year, Slobodkina exhibited this same painting, Flight, c. 1953, in a one-person show at the John Heller Gallery in New York City. She also exhibited Composition in an Oval, 1953, one of her most masterful paintings.

Commanding attention with its large, oval shape (32½” x 61½”), this painting presents a dynamic aggregation of some of her most important motifs: the central fingerlike forms used in Composition, c. 1940, in the Gallatin Collection; the keyhole shapes (one in the center and one on the far right) similar to Abstraction with Black Shape, c. 1945—1951, exhibited in the Whitney Museum Annual in 1951; and the mechanical hinges recalling her interest in architectural forms. Yet, the most dramatic part of the painting is the large white ladder on the right. This image harkens back to Miró’s famous painting Dog Barking at the Moon, 1926, which Slobodkina would have seen in the Gallatin Collection. Miró, however, used a ladder to draw the viewer into a surreal landscape; Slobodkina positioned her ladder leaning outward toward the viewer, seeming to provide an escape route.

The Art Digest critic Margaret Breuning described Slobodkina’s work at the Heller Gallery: “each painting might be considered a ‘self-contained’ cosmos” and she pointed to Composition in an Oval as “an outstanding canvas ¹¹⁷.” However, she also compared the paintings to “early cubist flat-patterning ¹¹⁸,” which placed Slobodkina’s work in the context of an earlier avant-garde. Emily Genauer, reviewing the show in the New York Herald Tribune, concluded that Slobodkina “might be called a classic among abstractionist painters ¹¹⁹.” Genauer continued:

Working in this vein for many years, she paints canvases that are as neatly put together of geometrical shapes as a kaleidoscopic image. Her color is clear and pure, her compositions are three-dimensional. Color areas hold together as firmly as if each had a magnetic attraction for the others. This is most attractive and skilled painting ¹²⁰.

Genauer’s description, too, praises Slobodkina but also associates her work with an earlier abstract style.

Pop Art, Hard-Edge Painting, and Minimal Art

That Slobodkina would not exhibit in a major one-person show in New York City again until 1980 is at once a measure of the changing nature of the avant-garde as well as her own personal and artistic life. With her commitment to geometric abstract art, she continued to participate in the AAA exhibitions. But, like other geometric artists, she found herself with fewer opportunities as Abstract Expressionism proliferated during the 1950s. Then, all abstract art was challenged by Pop Art, which focused on figurative imagery from popular culture.

Like Pop Art, hard-edge painting—another reaction to Abstract Expressionism—became widespread in the 1960s. By avoiding Cubist and Neo-Plastic compositional strategies and incorporating the large formats and nonrelational surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, the geometric abstract art of the 1960s and 1970s presented an original direction in American art. However, despite the fact that hard-edge painting was influenced by some aspects of Abstract Expressionism, it occurred as a reaction to that “painterly” movement.

A Continuing Tradition of Geometric Abstract Art

Hard-edge painting can be placed within a continuing tradition of geometric abstract art in the United States, which includes the work produced in the 1930s and 1940s. The fear of associations with the “old” instead of the “new”—indicating a lack of progress—prompted some critics and artists in the 1960s to avoid the connections between these two periods that focused on geometric forms.

However, the geometric art of the 1930s and 1940s created by the members of the AAA should be connected to the hard-edge painting of the 1960s and 1970s. The consolidation of the geometric abstract tradition, from all decades of the 20th century, creates a more accurate and a more complex context through which to view the development of abstract art in the U.S. It also establishes the important role of AAA members like Slobodkina, Bolotowsky, and Reinhardt as critical links between the two periods ¹²¹.

Although Slobodkina’s work in the 1960s could be considered geometric abstraction—it is defined by clear, hard edges painted between geometric shapes—it remained closer to Cubism with its overlapping planes of color. She may have been influenced to some extent by the size and scale of hard-edge painting and Minimal Art, but she continued to work independently, outside the parameters of these movements.

Her captivating painting Triptych in Old Rose, 1964, combines three panels to create a larger painting, but the overlapping forms and eccentric shapes do not suggest the simplified and often much larger, hard-edge paintings of Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella.

Slobodkina’s Monochrome in Beige, 1968, repeated the triangular white sail-like forms of the Triptych in Old Rose, but the “sails” are muted with beige and gray and appear less sail-like and more abstract. In this painting, Slobodkina approached the monochromatic quality of Minimal Art, but she continued to insist on a composition with a dynamic array of overlapping shapes, viewing Minimal Art paintings as merely “empty spaces ¹²².”

Changes in Slobodkina’s Life in the 1960s and 1970s

During the 1960s and 1970s, Slobodkina’s life changed significantly. In 1960, after a long friendship, she married William Urquhart, a businessman she had met at the sixth AAA annual exhibition in 1942. Another change came in 1963, when her husband died. That same year, she was elected president of the AAA and served in this office until 1966, when she assumed the chairmanship of the Publications Committee. As chair, she was responsible for the group’s publication American Abstract Artists 1936–1966 ¹²³.

In 1978, Slobodkina moved to Hallandale, Florida, with her mother and her sister Tamara. She had a one-person show in Florida at the Hollywood Art Museum the next year. Then, in 1984, the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida, organized a large retrospective exhibition of her work, Esphyr Slobodkina: An Introspective. Slobodkina preferred the title “An Introspective” to “A Retrospective,” rejecting the concept of a chronological study of her work.

In fact, she wrote in her catalog essay for the show: “Frankly, I never gave a damn what people thought. As a result of that I always painted, sculpted, constructed, made collages, wall hangings, ‘Serendipographs,’ ‘Glass Sandwiches,’ dolls, books, clothes, furniture, etc., etc. and all at the same or approximately the same time ¹²⁴.” 

Not until the Feminist Movement pushed the boundaries of “fine art” outward to encompass crafts and other decorative arts was Slobodkina’s inclusive artistic strategy considered more acceptable within the dialogue of mainstream art ¹²⁵.

Her lack of interest in current trends and concepts of “progress,” or “development,” made her ask, “And why do I have such a hard time dividing my work into definite periods? ¹²⁶” Although she certainly developed a recognizable style, Slobodkina’s work does not always follow a linear progression. She worked intuitively: “I don’t feel a traitor to my chosen art if, in the middle of preparations for an exhibition of abstract paintings, catching sight of an exceptionally attractive bouquet of flowers, I have a strong urge to paint it, I simply go ahead, and paint it ¹²⁷.”

Rediscovered as a Pioneer of American Abstract Art

New attention was focused on Slobodkina’s work in the 1980s, when she was rediscovered as a pioneer of American abstract art. In 1980, her paintings from the 1930s and 1940s were featured in New York City in an exhibition at the Sid Deutsch Gallery. With additional shows at the Sid Deutsch Gallery in 1982, 1985, and 1988, her work again became well-known among curators and collectors ¹²⁸.

In 1983, two of Slobodkina’s works, Construction No. 3, 1935, and Ancient Sea Song, 1943, were exhibited in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927—1944 at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City in 1984 ¹²⁹. This landmark exhibition presented the first comprehensive study of abstract art in the United States from 1927, when Gallatin established the Gallery of Living Art, until 1944, the year of Mondrian’s death ¹³⁰. In this exhibition, curators John R. Lane and Susan C. Larsen brought the early work of Esphyr Slobodkina and many of her abstract artist-colleagues to public attention in a major New York museum.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, Slobodkina’s work gained attention when pieces were acquired by important collectors and exhibited in major museums ¹³¹. The Ebsworth Collection: American Modernism, 1911–1947, organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1987, and The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction 1930–1945, organized by the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., in 1990, both served to document Slobodkina’s contribution and place her in a significant historical context.

In 1992, a retrospective exhibition of Slobodkina’s painting and sculpture, as well as examples of her children’s book illustrations and fabric design, opened at the Tisch Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, and traveled to the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College, in New York City. A catalog was published with essays by curators Gail Stavitsky and Elizabeth Wylie ¹³². Holland Cotter, in a New York Times review titled “Wolfing Down Modernism Whole,” emphasized the importance of the abstract avant-garde in the 1930s and explained that these artists, including Slobodkina, who worked between the two World Wars were “trying to digest three decades of imported styles in a hectic few years ¹³³.”

In another review of this show, Art in America critic Janet Koplos perceptively discussed two issues still raised by Slobodkina’s work: “The exhibition and catalogue provoked me to think about when and why an artist’s use of a variety of mediums becomes a liability, and about how dangerously easy it is to remember art movements by the work of a few major practitioners rather than as the messy assortment of activities they actually were ¹³⁴.”

A decade later, in March 2002 (a few months before her death), the issue of the variety of Slobodkina’s creative work—and her refusal to hide her work with textiles and other so-called decorative arts—was directly addressed in an exhibition aptly titled Diversity at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York City. Grace Glueck, New York Times art critic, observed that Slobodkina’s “paintings and collages of interlocking geometric forms are considered her signature works ¹³⁵.” Then she acknowledged and praised Slobodkina for the remarkable versatility of her work: “None of Ms. Slobodkina’s works suffer from her versatility. They are all of a creative piece, and a pleasure to behold ¹³⁶.” Finally, in the 21st century, the perceptions of curators and critics regarding the status of “fine arts” and “decorative arts” had caught up with Slobodkina’s.

A concurrent exhibition, Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, at the National Academy of Design Museum in New York City, brought to attention a group of less well-known artists who represented American modernism. Grace Glueck also reviewed this show, which included Crossroad #2, c. 1942—45, by Slobodkina, and described the exhibition as “an illuminating glimpse of what went on in American art across a 75-year period ¹³⁷.” 

Glueck recognized the importance of these less well-known artists: “Happily revived here, too, are a handful of American Modernists of the 1930’s and 40’s, among them Jan Matulka, Theodore Roszak, Esphyr Slobodkina, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Carl Holty, Ilya Bolotowsky, George L.K. Morris, Gertrude Greene and Albert Gallatin ¹³⁸.” As part of the avant-garde before World War II, Esphyr Slobodkina, along with her colleagues in the American Abstract Artists group, were applauded for their role in the development of American art.

Spanning most of the 20th century, the narrative of Esphyr Slobodkina’s remarkable life—her independence, her varied talents, her unfailing commitment to abstract art—helps to create a broader perspective through which to view the development of abstract art in the United States.

Copyright © 2008 Sandra Kraskin

Esphyr Slobodkina’s Trophy No. 1 certainly looks like some kind of wild creature that was hunted and mounted on a wall plaque. Yet this conquered beast would have to hail from some alien planet of mechanized bug-things with its screw eyes, plastic red tongue, and metal antennae.

Like most of Slobodkina’s two and three-dimensional constructions, Trophy No. 1 is playfully ironic, combining found objects in unexpected and evocative ways. These works stand in sharp contrast to the clean lines, delineated geometries, and flat expanses of color that characterize her coolly non-objective paintings. Slobodkina’s assemblages are notable for their visual and symbolic complexity, and because hers are among the few examples of assemblage art produced in the United States during the 1930s.

The late 1920s to the early 1940s was a formative period in the development of American abstract painting and sculpture [1]. Although abstraction was not new to the American art scene, never before had artists mobilized so ambitiously to develop native interpretations of European and Russian modernist movements.

Cubism, constructivism, and surrealism provided important conceptual and aesthetic underpinnings for new explorations into abstract idioms that would gain a distinctly American character.  The American Abstract Artists (AAA), formed in 1936 to “express the authenticity and autonomy of the modern movement in the United States [2],” was a driving force in these efforts, exhibiting radically non-representational art during an era in which social realism and Regionalism’s reassuring images of Americana were the dominant modes of expression.

The sculpture produced by the American Abstract Artists, of which Slobodkina was a founding member, synthesized a variety of European influences. For example, the welded abstractions of David Smith and Ibram Lassaw combined surrealist imagination with constructivist concepts of open forms, kineticism, and the use of industrial materials. Ilya Bolotowsky, Charles Shaw, and Gertrude Greene created Arp-esque relief constructions, while Burgoyne Diller’s constructivist reliefs reflected tenets of Neo-plasticism. Cubist-inspired shapes characterized the freestanding forms of George L.K. Morris, Louis Schanker, and Herzl Emanuel [3]. Slobodkina’s three-dimensional works are rooted in similar traditions, but stand apart for their use of unmasked found objects.

Slobodkina was among the few who used materials reclaimed from everyday objects, such as typewriter keys, furniture legs, dishware, hinges, motor parts, and gears, incorporating them into reliefs or fully three-dimensional constructions without disguising their quotidian origins through paint or other means.  These works are of a similar spirit perhaps only to fellow AAA member Vaclav Vytcail, whose reliefs harnessed the “looser, more informal spirit of the cubist collage and assemblage or of the Merz constructions of Schwitters [4].”

Pioneered by Picasso and further developed by Dadaists such as Duchamp, Man Ray, and Kurt Schwitters, assemblage [5] and its two-dimensional cousin, collage, were already well-established modes of modernist expression by the time Slobodkina began her explorations of the techniques around 1935. Like abstract painting, the advent of assemblage provided a visual language that could address modern understandings of art, the self, and society.

As noted by Katherine Hoffman, “collage may be seen as a quintessential twentieth-century art form with multiple layers and signposts pointing to a variety of forms and realities, and to the possibility or suggestion of countless new realities [6].” The very act of fragmentation and reconstitution inherent in collage and assemblage served as an apt metaphor for the modern world where absolutes and established truths were continually being called into question by new discoveries in science, technology, and psychology.

It is likely that Slobodkina first became aware of collage and its aesthetic potential during her childhood in Russia. By 1918, when Slobodkina attended her first exhibition of modernist art at age 10 [7], Russian artists had already been experimenting with collage for about six years. Artists such as Rosanova, Goncharova, Malevich, and Popova collaborated with poets to illustrate texts and book covers, often with “brightly colored collaged papers” as early as 1912 [8]. Malevich, before developing Suprematism, executed a number of “alogical associations” – collages that combined abstract forms, words, and recognizable objects [9]. 

Further, when the Revolution erupted, political posters bearing a crisp, graphical collage aesthetic dominated the Russian landscape. Although it is difficult to postulate how much the Russian avant-garde directly influenced Slobodkina, her 1938 collage illustrations for Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Fireman evokes this tradition as each page comes alive with similarly bright hues, simple shapes, and repetitious patterns. Decades after its initial publication, children’s book scholar Barbara Bader noted that “The Little Fireman in its original five brilliant, off-beat colors is perhaps the apogee of modernism in a picture book [10].”

In 1935, a few years prior to the publication of The Little Fireman, Slobodkina created her first assemblages, Construction No. 3 and Boat Construction, also with roots in Russian art. In these two relief constructions, found pieces of metal, wood, and wire are affixed to canvas board in a manner that conjures Vladimir Tatlin’s “painterly reliefs” from 1913-14.

More contemporaneously, Slobodkina’s constructions relate to David Smith’s painted reliefs of the early 1930s – a mode that Smith soon abandoned in favor of welded steel forms – and Vytacil’s constructed reliefs mentioned earlier. The creation of relief constructions that utilized wood and metal elements was common among AAA artists such as Gertrude Green, Ilya Bolotowsky, Charles Shaw, and Burgoyne Diller, but Slobodkina’s works were visually quite different from those of her colleagues.  For example, in Greene’s Construction in Blue (1937), each smoothly shaped wooden attachment blends almost seamlessly with the painted canvas upon which they float. These are not found objects but carefully shaped sculptural forms that serve a purely aesthetic purpose.

By contrast, the objects in Slobodkina’s Construction No. 3 are rough and unrefined, betraying their origins as scrap. Rather than hover atop the canvas, her forms are clearly bolted down by visible nails and screws. In true assemblage fashion, Slobodkina uses found objects not strictly for their formal shapes and colors, but for their unique textures and myriad associations.

The introduction of assemblage art to the United States can be traced to around 1915 when New York Dada, associated with Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, was an influential force. In 1917, when Duchamp exhibited his infamous Fountain (in fact a shiny porcelain urinal), this radical move challenged tenets of acceptable art practices and materials and paved the way for further experimentation.

As observed by Jeffrey Wechsler, “the Dada presence in American added immeasurably to the atmosphere of experimentation which inspired many of this country’s first-generation modernists [11].” Suddenly, it was okay for any object, regardless of how prosaic its origin, to be used in the context of fine art. However, outside of Duchamp and Man Ray, few artists working in the United States adopted the practices of collage and assemblage, at least initially. Dickran Tashjian asserts that “except for Man Ray, American Artists generally neglected assemblage during the early phase of modernism after the Armory show [12].”

Among those who did explore assemblage in the 1920s were Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella, and John Covert. But it was not until the mid 1940s and into the 1950s and 60s that assemblage became more widely practiced by artists such as Louise Nevelson, Lee Bontecou, Richard Stankiewicz, Mark di Suvero, and John Chamberlain.  Slobodkina’s assemblages of the mid to late 30’s thus offer one of the rare links between New York Dada and later assemblage art.

Around 1938, Slobodkina produced two of her finest assemblage works, Tabletop Gazelle (originally named Synthesis) and The Derelict, both constructed from parts of a vintage standing mirror that Slobodkina found in a secondhand shop. Deconstructing the antique, Slobodkina used the mirror to complete a makeshift dressing table that furnished her 60th street Manhattan apartment, and, not letting anything go to waste, refashioned the leftover stand into these artworks [13]. Also incorporated into both pieces are parts of a disassembled Windsor chair. For each, the result is an elegant composition of abstract shapes and innovative spatial relationships.

Like fellow AAA members David Smith and Ibram Lassaw, Slobodkina demonstrates a concern for creating open forms as opposed to the closed masses of more traditional sculptural works. In addition to her formalist concerns, these works conjure imaginative associations that relate to Surrealist practices of unexpected juxtapositions and evocation of the unconscious.

Indeed, Slobodkina discussed The Derelict in terms of “subconscious Surrealist association [14].” This work “was related to a Russian song she had learned in her youth; the poetic lyrics describe gray, derelict ships in a frozen sea [15].” Also like many Surrealist works, The Derelict synthesizes seemingly opposing visual motifs: it’s both melancholy and serene, full of symbolic allusions yet ostensibly non-objective.

While Slobodkina’s approach to painting is painstaking and methodical, entailing a number of preliminary pencil and oil sketches and the use of a transfer grid, her assemblage art is composed in a more improvisational, spontaneous manner. Like many Surrealist and Dada approaches to art-making, Slobodkina relied on elements of chance and serendipity when working in three-dimensions.  As Elizabeth Wylie has noted, Slobodkina “works in a direct way, making her sculptures out of found objects that trigger associations for the artist as she constructs them [16].” Slobodkina echoes this conclusion in talking about her 1938 piece, Sailor’s Wife:

There used to be some kind of crazy hanger for trousers… Anyway this looked like an anchor so I used this and an embroidery hoop and a darning egg and strings, so I mounted the whole thing and it began to look like a sailor’s wife at home doing the darning and sewing and embroidery, and may be associated with her waiting for the return of her man. That’s where those titles come from…I never set out to make a sailor’s wife – it would ruin everything. It’s more like a writing process. Writers don’t know what they’re going to write, it comes out in the writing [17].

Objects associated with needle craft again appear in Thrust No. 1, 1947. One of Slobodkina’s more aggressive works, Thrust transfigures normally benign objects into a threatening weapon as weaving shuttles and thick, industrial-sized needles comprise a deadly catapult of sorts.  One is reminded of Man Ray’s 1921 Gift where a simple flatiron is made menacing by the addition of sharp, teeth-like tacks. In both, the functions of utilitarian objects have been cleverly subverted, challenging viewer expectations and echoing William Seitz’s observation that “Dada awakened senses and sensibilities to the immense multiple collision of values, forms, and effects among which we live, and to the dialectic of creation and destruction, affirmation and negation, by which life and art progress [18].”

It is thus through Slobodkina’s assemblage that one can gain a sense of her wit and unfettered imagination. And although grounded in abstract principles of composition practiced by the AAA, Slobodkina’s constructions stand apart for their unconscious associations and provocative juxtapositions.

In addition to her three-dimensional assemblages, Slobodkina created a number of collages, including a notable series from 1948 that includes Crossroads, Shopping Industry and The Spangles. Each one, composed while working in the office of her second husband, William Urquhart, incorporates the unremarkable flotsam of workaday life: used papers, stamps, envelopes, bills, and product packaging. In discussing Crossroads, Slobodkina recalls:

This is a tiny little thing with the old-fashioned telephone sign…I did those between doing my bookkeeping and answering phones and doing everything else in the office. I was really working the materials that came across my desk. These were old fashioned telephone bills with these blue telephones…I use anything I feel like [19].

Slobodkina’s temerity to “use anything” as artistic media evidences her bold, individualistic spirit. However, she also owes a debt of gratitude to Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and his influential Merz pictures of the 1920s that pioneered the use of everyday junk – “streetcar tickets, cloakroom checks, bits of wood, wire twine, bent wheels, tissue paper, tin cans, chips of glass, etc [20]”– as fertile material for collages. In elevating daily detritus to the realm fine art, Schwitters and Slobodkina call attention to the throw-away nature of consumer culture. Whether this evocation is celebratory or critical remains ambiguous, left for the viewer to decide.

Throughout the fifties, Slobodkina focused mostly on painting. However, in the sixties, when “junk” art became more widely practiced by artists such as John Chamberlain, Slobodkina returned to assemblage more avidly. Like Chamberlain, Slobodkina created works that reflect an interest in mechanical objects, but while Chamberlain’s crushed car bodies have a critical edge, Slobodkina’s constructions are more lighthearted and playful.

Escape No. 1, 1960, resembles a dead or dying giant insect, its weighty body an industrial-sized metal horn culled from a commercial alarm system and its spindly legs pieces of radio antennae. While this machinated bug fails its escape attempt, a related work, Escape No. 2, 1960, looks like it might succeed. Like a boat out of a surrealist dreamscape, with a sail made from the top half of a fan cover, a sturdy metal hull from some unidentified machinery, and rigging from painted black string, this fantastic dinghy seems about to float away.

Another work from this period, Typewriter Bird, 1960-1, is the first of several assemblages using antique typewriter parts. Slobodkina recalls, “I found an old typewriter in the corner and couldn’t use it because it was broken so I made something out of it [21].” Here, typebars are arranged like plumage around the carriage as several typewriter keys, with their finger-sized round tips, accentuate the display. All three works belie Slobodkina’s lifelong fascination with mechanized things and her belief that even outmoded technologies can be put to good use.

The eighties marked a creative renaissance for Slobodkina, who constructed some of her most provocative assemblages during this decade. More so than earlier works, these possess a wry, satirical edge and demonstrate an active engagement with contemporaneous social issues and political concerns. For example, Our Great Big Happy Condominium in the Sky, made in 1988, visualizes how humans might reside in the future should space colonization become a reality. The compact, rocket-shaped abode is constructed from wooden weaving shuttlecocks anchored into a metal base made from a five-stud trailer hub. Slobodkina’s prescience is at once amusing – these obviously phallic structures are, after all, ridiculous – but not unimaginable. Her keen ability to illuminate the thin line between reality and the absurd contributes to the success of this work.

Within the Mysterious Parameters of Privileged Information, also from 1988, synthesizes the diverse influences that have informed Slobodkina’s work to date. It immediately conjures Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist maquette, Monument to the Third International, 1919-20, but with an absurdist, Dada twist. Here, Tatlin’s architectural spiral has been replaced by interlocking teethed discs. They enclose a white furniture leg crowned by a red wheel caster that stands tall in a mockery of a patriotic symbol – like an emasculated Washington Monument. The discs bear the inscription, in red, “within the mysterious parameters of privileged information.”

According to Slobodkina, the work was inspired by media coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings. Annoyed by the dissembling nature of political speech, especially the overuse of ambiguous terms like “privileged information” and “parameters,” she created this non-monument as a critical response to political doublespeak. Slobodkina explains that “on the bottom is written the definition of parameter. That explains why it is such an absurdity because actually they can’t be within parameters because the parameter itself is a changeable entity so there is no such thing as within the parameters of anything [22].”

In another socially conscious work, Slobodkina offers a subtle critique of the educational system. Her Sadly Sagging Educational Spiral, 1988, brings together a typewriter spring, fan cover, and an automobile “U” joint. These disparate manufactured parts are reassembled to form a new apparatus that appears capable of locomotion. The irony is that this machine would likely travel only in circles, never making any forward progress.

A more personal piece, The Broken Promise of Marital Bliss, 1989, alludes to Slobodkina’s failed first marriage to artist Ilya Bolotowksy (the two married in 1933 and were separated by 1936), but in a humorous rather than wistful or melancholy manner. Slobodkina arranges the candy cane-shaped scrolls of a bentwood chair, probably chosen for their graceful curves resembling fiddleheads, so that they oppose each other. Attached are smashed pieces of ceramic dishware – perhaps a reference to inevitable domestic disputes.  A broken egg cup serves as the central pivot around which the sinuous scrolls warily regard each other like spouses on the verge of estrangement. Not even the strong gravitational pull of domestic responsibility can hold this metaphoric couple together. The presence of a third scroll suggests an adulterer also plays a role in this visual fable of marital life.

Trophy No. 1, cited at the beginning of this essay, and its companion, Trophy No. 2, are part of a series that Slobodkina referred to as GIOSO, or Great Ideas of Small Origins. In coining this moniker, Slobodkina states a fundamental concept that has informed her assemblage art since the 1930s: that any object or material, no matter how mundane, can serve as the starting point for great works of art. She would refer to the same works as being part of her “Destroy and Search” series. An inverse of the military slogan “Search and Destroy,” the phrase refers to Slobodkina’s tactic of deconstructing household objects and discovering new ways to reconfigure their parts into artworks [23].

Trophy No. 1 and Trophy No. 2 are both wall mounted constructions that combine typewriter parts with copper printing plates that were used for the production of AAA catalogs. In fact, one can see trace outlines of old designs permanently ghosted into the plates [24].

These are perhaps Slobodkina’s most fantastical assemblages, and, according to one critic, “could be straight out of David Cronenberg’s film version of Naked Lunch [25].” Slobodkina returned to the series in 1998 with Thrust Trophy No. 3. Although using similar materials, including typewriter parts and copper plates, this construction is less bug-like. Instead, it more closely resembles the face of a 19^th century camera. Where the lens would be is a circular opening through which a metal tongue protrudes. Spindly metal elements add a touch of anthropomorphism to this unusual relic.

Slobodkina continued to produce three-dimensional constructions until about a year before her death. In fact, her last completed work, Ahead with Fair Winds No. 2, 2001, is an assemblage. In this piece, Slobodkina used more recognizably contemporary materials, including Formica, a computer fan, and a CPU casing. Made at age 93, this late piece testifies to Slobodkina’s singular artistry and tireless spirit. Her keen sense of abstract composition and her fearless conviction to “use anything” are qualities that distinguished Slobodkina’s 1930s assemblage art and that will attest to her enduring legacy.

When considering the work of Esphyr Slobodkina, to do so from an interdisciplinary perspective is insightful.  The playful, wry titles that she favors hint at an alternate, successful career as a renowned author and illustrator of children’s books, including her classic, Caps for Sale. 

She has participated in a broad spectrum of other fields as well, including architecture, interior design, polychrome textile printing, millinery, and couture dressmaking with her mother.  She has designed two homes.  And no family residence is considered complete until it has been “Esphyrized.” 

She is an extraordinary personality and an engaging raconteur who prides herself on having been totally self-reliant throughout her long and fascinating life.  

Resourceful and creative, she has written her own autobiography in three volumes, replete with photographs, correspondence with many luminaries of twentieth century art, and family recipes from her native Russia.  Her detailed and engaging narrative provides a fascinating glimpse into the art world of the middle years of the twentieth century.

Born in Siberia in 1908, Slobodkina moved with her family to Manchuria to escape the political unrest of the Russian revolution.  As a young woman, she traveled alone to America, enrolling at the National Academy of Design, an experience she found stultifying.  However in 1931 she met fellow student, Ilya Bolotowsky, who for a time became her artistic mentor, and from 1933 to 1938, her husband. 

Like other Russian modernists, surrounded by ancient icons and a rich craft tradition, Slobodkina developed a lifelong appreciation of clear, rich colors, and flat, stylized forms.  By the late 1930s she had begun working in a flattened, abstracted style that incorporated line, suspended or interlocking forms, and pure, unmodulated color.  Her abiding affection for the Russian craft tradition is reflected in her ongoing interest in crafts and the decorative arts.

Since the inception in 1937 of American Abstract Artists – she was a founding member along with Bolotowsky – Slobodkina has served as the organization’s president, secretary and treasure, as well as its bibliographer.  She was a regular exhibitor in their annual shows, and a close associate of the “Park Avenue Cubists,” George L.K. Morris, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Charles Green Shaw, and A.E. Gallatin.  Indeed, in 1940 Gallatin, who owned two of her works, organized her first one-person exhibition at his Gallery of Living Art. 

Through the 1940s Slobodkina exhibited along with Byron Browne, John Graham, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko; she entertained Mondrian at a dinner party at her apartment.  Ad Reinhardt included her in his famous cartoon, How to Look at Modern Art in America.  She has served fellowships at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. 

Obviously no stranger to the art world, Slobodkina describes herself as a “late bloomer,” someone who was always so actively engaged in the business of making a living that for many years she never really had time to actively promote her own work.  Nonetheless, her paintings and sculptures appear in notable private and public collections.  Her murals decorate public facilities around the country.

Given the many competing demands upon her time it is remarkable that Slobodkina has created such a substantial body of work; it is informative to approach it from a perspective that reflects her diverse interests.  She may be best known for her paintings, but only because she chose to focus on this medium when exhibiting with American Abstract Artists.  Although she began working abstractly in 1934, she has always taken pleasure in working representationally when so inclined. 

Slobodkina began creating sculpture of found objects in 1938; with roots in Russian Constructivism and affinities with the art of Calder and Miró these remain among her most appealing works. For many years she found inspiration in the keys and innards of discarded typewriters, but computer components now appear regularly in her small sculptures.  Nothing goes to waste. Buttons, trim and squares of fabric are incorporated into jewelry, collages, and tapestries.  Taut parallel lines of laced cord – a signature motif – appear in paintings, assemblage and sculpture.  

Slobodkina’s work is encompassing, it includes murals, collages, jewelry design, and “serendipographs.”  Her astute sensitivity to color enables her to make the most unlikely combinations succeed both in her paintings and in her home decoration.  With a highly refined sense of artistic style, she often favors ornate Victorian frames for her hard-edge geometric abstractions. Everything is carefully crafted, but dating her work is not a personal priority. 

In a hand-written 1983 addendum to her autobiography, she writes “I always painted, sculpted, constructed, made collages, wall hangings, ‘serendipograph glass sandwiches’, dolls, books, clothes, furniture, etc., etc., and all at approximately the same time.”  Art theory and trends, politics, and philosophy are unimportant to her.  Instead, “Plastic arts belong in a sphere of sensual delights.” 

Traversing nearly a century of inspiration, it is Slobodkina’s enduring delight in the creative act and her single-minded pursuit of her aesthetic vision in a multiplicity of media that continues to enchant. 

Anne Cohen DePietro, October 2001

The American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded by a group of artists that was very influential in shifting the public opinion of American abstract painting in the 1930s and 1940s from one of rejection or mere tolerance to acceptance. Unfortunately, the recognition the AAA received for their artistic accomplishments is restricted to works accomplished during those two decades.

Though these were important developmental years of American abstraction, many of these artists went on to develop their ideas in many fascinating directions.

Ironically, the artists that eclipsed the AAA group’s prominence after 1949 were the abstract expressionists, who were greatly indebted to these elder abstract painters. Were it not for the steps painters and sculptors of the AAA had taken toward developing an American art identity, abstract expressionism might not have developed as we know it.

If I were to pick one time in American art history that I could go back and witness first hand, it would be the early years of the American Abstract Artists group. The AAA set out to establish an art identity for the modern painter in the United States. In the beginning, they were criticized and even ignored, but the tireless search for something unique in the world of art culminated in the development of abstract expressionism.

Indeed, the abstract expressionist movement shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York City – where it remains today – and the AAA founders and their contemporaries were the torchbearers, establishing abstraction as a viable form of expression in America.

Some people have described early abstraction in this country as derivative of that of the Europeans. The AAA’s early emulation of European artists’ concepts is often described as misinterpretations by naïve artists. This description is valid, as most of the American artists did not have opportunities to travel to Europe to view paintings of their overseas counterparts firsthand.

But, many of these interpretations were clever innovations that further developed modernism as a whole. In an attempt to build on modernism – a largely European form of artistic expression – the Americans incorporated elements of what was familiar to them. The AAA artists pulled imagery and objects together into magnificent compositions time and time again.

I equate an early AAA artist to the American mockingbird. A mockingbird borrows and embellishes the songs of other birds around him. Often he changes the phrasing as he incorporates each element into an orchestration of birdsong.

We cannot know if the mockingbird selectively alters the fragments he takes from other birds or if he simply alters them to suit his composition. The artist’s work can be studied in an endeavor to map his/her sources of artistic style or to determine the original function of some small object in a composition, just as you can also try to break down a mockingbird’s song to discover his sources. But first it is important to simply enjoy the composition.

Much of the post war art that we now see is highly individualistic. Each artist is striking out to find that next great movement. No longer do we have the groups of artists searching for answers as a team. The listing of original members of American Abstract Artists is largely made up of people not born on American soil.

Each member brought his or her own set of cultural ideals, biases and passions to the group. Through their meetings, debates and protests, they shaped the art world and each other into a whole that was greater than its parts. They were great examples of the American melting pot. Out of many shards of art concepts, they forged a style of expression that has not tarnished from age.

Esphyr Slobodkina turned her hand to the picture book for the most pragmatic of reasons, as a means of paying the rent, but quickly embraced the genre for the opportunities it held in store to combine her central creative passion for abstraction with her natural delight in storytelling.

In 1937, in hopes of bolstering her income and on a tip from a New York society friend, Slobodkina presented her portfolio to Margaret Wise Brown, a glamorous young editor known for her iconoclastic approach to book making. Brown, who was also a gifted writer, worked for William R. Scott & Company, a fledging publishing firm with a small office located within the Greenwich Village headquarters of one of America’s centers of progressive education, the Bank Street School. Dedicated to publishing distinctively modern, Bank Street-inspired picture books that challenged children to think and see for themselves, the Scott staff was just then planning its first list.

The strongly patterned semi-abstract collages of the book dummy Slobodkina had prepared for the occasion seemed ideally matched to the publisher’s purposes. Ideally, that is, in all key respects but one. As a tale about a small child’s adventures with her elfin magical friends, Mary and the Poodies fell unmistakably within the genre of literary fantasy.

As such, it was at odds with the Bank Street precept (derived from decades of empirical research with nursery school children and early grade schoolers) that youngsters under the age of seven cared little for fantasy, living as they did in an all-absorbing “here and now” world of immediate sensory experience and modern day wonders (Skyscrapers! Telephones! Trolleys!) Such children, Bank Street founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell believed, wanted nothing so much as playful, rhythmically patterned stories about the world they knew.

Brown, who as a maverick poet for preschoolers would herself go on to challenge Bank Street orthodoxy, declined the book but in short order produced a more suitable manuscript of her own for Slobodkina to illustrate.

The first American picture book to be rendered in cut-paper collage, The Little Fireman appeared in Scott’s fall 1938 inaugural seasonand remains a touchstone work of picture-book art and design. Joining Slobodkina on that first roster of artists was Clement Hurd, an American painter and decorative artist who had studied with Fernand Léger in Paris. Subsequent Scott lists would feature Cubist-inflected graphics by Leonard Weisgard and by Slobodkina’s friend and fellow charter member of the American Abstract Artists group, Charles G. Shaw.

Slobodkina later explained her choice of collage by recalling that in her determined effort to cobble together a convincing presentation for her potential employer she had fallen back on her childhood love of paper-doll making. In doing so, her instincts had proven sound indeed. Reflecting on the purely aesthetic qualities of collage as an illustration medium, she would later observe that cutouts “enforce” a “simplicity of line that cannot be achieved by pen.”[i]

For Slobodkina, simplicity of composition and design was a priority because her ultimate goal was the creation of a kind of non-prescriptive art that left children with points of entry for their own imaginative participation. For this reason, she chose not to indicate the eyes or other distinguishing features of her brightly hued fireman-cutouts, the better for children to project themselves into the scene.

As a technique with which preschoolers often had some experience, collage was immediately recognized by Brown and her colleagues as serving the goals of progressive education in another, related way: by providing children with engaging models for their own art making.

Brown continued as both a writer and editor to collaborate with Slobodkina on picture books. She advised her in business matters and urged her to keep writing despite her self-doubt. “You write like a painter,” Brown assured her, “creating vivid pictures with very few words.”[ii] In 1940, Scott published Slobodkina’s first solo effort, Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys & Their Monkey Business. As befit a streamlined retelling of a traditional folk tale—Scott by then had grown a bit less hide-bound about stories involving make-believe–Slobodkina adjusted her illustration style in the direction of a deliberately naïve type of representation reminiscent of Le Douanier Rousseau.

Commenting on the rationale for the change, she recalled: “This [hapless peddler] being a very specific individual, there was no question of dropping details of his face. He wasn’t just any Little Fireman, a symbolic figure with which any child was expected to identify. My peddler was to be a person, a character, and any child dramatizing the story would, I felt, naturally play him as an actor plays a part.”[iii]

 Published in the fall of 1940, Caps for Sale was a critical success, with the New York Times Book Review praising Slobodkina’s “brilliant pictures in which the design is as pleasantly repetitious and balanced as the text.”[iv]

The book enjoyed a respectable initial sale notwithstanding what the author considered the highly unsatisfactory reproduction of her artwork. William Scott must have agreed with her on the latter point, as half a dozen years later (Brown by then had left the firm to pursue her writing career full-time) he invited the artist to re-illustrate the book, offering guarantees that he had learned his lesson about false economies.

Happily, the new edition, which appeared in 1947, came “a great deal closer to my original concept,” she wrote in her memoir.[v] Sales spiraled upward as affection for the book grew throughout the post-war baby boom years and beyond.

Decades later, Caps for Sale still easily holds its own beside such other classic mid-century American tales of mischief and monkeyshines as Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline and the Reys’ Curious George, books whose arrival together signaled a deepening acceptance by the American cultural mainstream of the progressive educators’ and modern psychologists’ view that children’s playfulness was not a harmful tendency to be suppressed, but rather a natural asset to be trusted and nurtured. In translation, Caps has gone on reach readers of French, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Xhosa, and Afrikaans as well.

Two more Scott picture books written by Brown followed in 1948: The Little Farmer, which the author called Slobodkina’s “masterpiece . . . in humor and design and color,”[vi] and The Little Cowboy.

By then, Slobodkina had gained a good enough grasp of the offset process to be able to respond to its limitations as a challenge to her ingenuity. In a concerted effort to help limit Scott’s costs while also safeguarding the integrity of her work, she devised the rigorous plan for the illustrations for The Little Cowboy of restricting herself to a mere two colors (as opposed to the three colors Scott had granted her for The Little Farmer, or the four that larger publishers considered standard.)

While the results of this experiment proved a disappointment to her, with the “special charm of the true raised effect of the original collage” having “completely flattened out” in reproduction[vii], she still managed to capture the essence not only of Brown’s quicksilver text but also of the participatory style of learning that had inspired it. “The pictures,” the New York Herald-Tribune observed, “should be stimulating to younger children who might love to try to draw or to cut out big and little piebald ponies just like [those depicted in the illustrations].”[viii]

Brown’s untimely death in 1952 at the age of forty-two, of an embolism following routine surgery, suddenly left Slobodkina without her principal champion in the children’s-book world. Her selection to illustrate one of the many manuscripts left behind by Brown, Sleepy ABC (1953), helped ease the transition, and marked the start of her relationship with one of her two major publishers from then onward, Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard.

In keeping with the bedtime theme of Brown’s rhyming text, Slobodkina developed a patchwork quilt motif that unified the narrative content and design elements of her illustrations, and deftly harmonized with her signature collage technique. Two years later, Lothrop published her next solo effort, The Wonderful Feast, a simple yet beguiling tale drawn from Russian folklore about a barnyard at mealtime.

Given a freer hand with color than she had had in her last outings with Scott, Slobodkina had a field day, composing graphically bold collage spreads in which, as one admiring reviewer noted, “soft blues jostle sharp ones, plums, browns and greens give strength, orange touches pink judiciously and there is always enough white for drama. . . . The whole picture book is an aesthetic education for our youngest as well as a book they will surely love.”[ix]

For once setting aside her hard-bitten skepticism, Slobodkina took unalloyed pleasure in the reviewer’s praise. “For the first time in my life I was thrilled with a criticism. For the first time in my life the critic had really read, looked, and understood the thought behind my work.”[x]

For the next decade and a half, picture-book making had a regular spot in Slobodkina’s creative routine, with the artist producing one or sometimes two new books in nearly every year from the mid-1950s through 1970. She drew her inspiration from a wide range of sources: the places she happened to be living at the time (suburban New York for The Long Island Ducklings, 1961; Hallandale, Florida for Billy, The Condominium Cat, 1980); the perennially popular Caps for Sale (from which she elaborated two sequels: Pezzo the Peddler and the Circus Elephant, 1967, and Pezzo the Peddler and the Thirteen Silly Thieves, 1970); her Russian heritage (as for example Boris and His Balalaika, 1964, one of two picture books she wrote but did not illustrate herself); and, in one notable instance, her warm memories of growing up in Harbin, Manchuria.

The Flame, the Breeze, and the Shadow (1969), an energetic retelling of a traditional Chinese tale about the triumph of good-heartedness and quick thinking over snobbery and envy, gave Slobodkina the chance to explore her life-long love of Chinese art and material culture. In drawings behind which doubtless lay a substantial investment of time devoted to historical research, she produced some of her narratively most complex illustrations, for a book that in later years she would refer to as her personal favorite.

In all, Slobodkina had a hand in the creation of 22 picture books (not counting various re-illustrated editions), seven of them in collaboration with others. Her contributions to the genre, and in particular to the cause of elevating the status and expanding the potential of the picture book as an art form, were many and varied.

These may be limned in the enduring popularity of Caps for Sale; in the graphic dash and daring of two picture books that in recent years have enjoyed renewed life in reissued editions, The Wonderful Feast and Margaret Wise Brown’s Sleepy ABC; and in the singular example of Brown’s The Little Fireman in its original five-color Scott edition, a book that historian Barbara Bader has called “perhaps the apogee of modernism in the picture book.”[xi]

As the first American picture-book artist to experiment with collage and to grasp (however intuitively at first) the heuristic value of collage for illustration in books for children of the youngest ages, Slobodkina pointed the way for many later artists. Directly or indirectly, the example of her work set the stage for the distinctive contributions to the picture book of Leo Lionni, Ezra Jack Keats, Eric Carle, Ed Young, Lois Ehlert, Ellen Stoll Walsh, and others.

 At a time when the gallery world to which she also belonged paid scant attention to children’s-book illustration, Slobodkina seems never to have doubted the aesthetic worth of picture-book art in the larger scheme of artistic creation. Underpinning her minority view was the knowledge that the great nineteenth-century Russian poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin, who “almost single-handedly,” as she liked to remind American audiences, “brought about a metamorphosis in the Russian language,” had been moved to do so in large measure by the “lovely folk tales his nurse [had] told him” as a child.[xii]

Slobodkina concluded from this example that the cultural influences to which children were exposed could be of the greatest possible consequence.

She put the matter still more plainly when she wrote: “The parents, the teachers, the librarians, and yes, the writers and illustrators of children’s books must take their responsibility seriously, for the images, the verbal patterns, and the patterns of behavior they present to children in these lighthearted confections are likely to influence them for the rest of their lives. These esthetic impressions, just like the moral teachings of early childhood, remain indelible.”[xiii]