BIOGRAPHY

Maurice Sievan was born in 1898 in a farming community in Czarist Russia’s Ukraine, the sixth of 11 children. His childhood was interrupted by recurrent threats of anti-Semitic pogroms and in 1906 the family joined the great migration to the “Goldeneh Medina”, the golden door to freedom, the United States.  The family settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, where Maurice briefly attended public school, leaving at age 13.  Working at a commercial lithography shop, he submitted drawings  and sketches of the immigrant world to the Yiddish newspaper, The Daily Forward, which published them weekly along with a number of political cartoons, some of which survive in the Jewish Museum, New York City.

After service in the Merchant Marine during WWI, he mastered the new Silk Screen process, studying at night at the Art Students League and at the National Academy of Design and attending lectures at Cooper Union.  In 1923, he enrolled as a full-time student at the National Academy studying with his particular favorites, the young realist Leon Kroll and the distinguished figure painter, Charles Hawthorne. Until the end of the decade, Sievan produced a series of figure studies, portraits of young women and landscapes of New Hampshire and Vermont marked by a subtle touch and a warm, rich palette. 

He became a member of the Marxist John Reed Club, submitting illustrations to the Daily Worker and in 1930, volunteered to go to Russia to teach the Silk Screen Process in factories.  Disillusioned with the regimentation imposed by the Communist authorities, he was permitted to leave Russia.  He remained in Paris in 1931, frequenting the cafes in Montparnasse, painting, studying in the Louvre, taking classes under the cubist Andre Lhote and absorbing the influences of his favorite artists, Monet and Pissarro.  Before returning to the U.S., he had the great satisfaction of having two watercolors accepted for exhibition at the 1931 Salon d’Automne.

 Sievan moved to Greenwich Village in 1932, working as a free-lance Silk-Screen commercial artist, painting in shared cold water studios.  At a “rent-payment” party, he met a vivacious 25 year old, Lee Culik, whom he married in 1934.  Lee used a box camera to photograph his paintings and then began serious study of photography with Eliot Elisofon at the American Artists School where Maurice was teaching, and with Berenice Abbott at the New School, becoming longtime friends.  Lee quickly developed a unique personal vision which marked her as a creative artist in her own right.

Sievan joined the WPA Federal Art Project as an Art Teacher and as a “self-supervised” artist in the Easel Division in 1936 earning $24 per week, exhibiting his work at the Federal Art Gallery and the Temporary Gallery of the Municipal Art Committee alongside his friends Saul Berman, Martin Friedman, William Gropper and Louis Lozowick.  From 1934 to 1939 he produced a body of brilliantly painted cityscapes (Spring in Tompkins Square Park, Along the Harlem River, East 14th Street), and strong figurative works (Saul Berman at Work, Figure – 1937).  In 1938, he joined Emily Francis’ Contemporary Art Gallery with Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, with whom he became lifelong friends, as well as Burgoyne Diller, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Tobey.

In 1940, the couple bought a new home in an undeveloped area of Queens with a sunlit attic studio.  Maurice again took up teaching in 1942, beginning a ten-year relationship with the Summit Art Association in New Jersey and in 1946 at Queens College where he taught until 1966.  In an old Chevrolet outfitted as a mobile studio, he traveled the quiet tree-lined streets of this new environment, painting evocative landscapes which were exhibited in a 1945 show at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery.  The critic Emily Genauer praised the work as being in the tradition of Pissarro, Sisley and the Impressionists, hailing the artist as a “poet laureate” painting “in terms singularly personal.”   This period saw an evolving expressionist vision, his palette more intense, the forms of structures, trees and objects becoming sinuous, alive.  By the mid 1950s, after seeing the earth from an airplane for the first time, he abandoned painting from nature entirely and painted only imaginary landscapes giving free rein to the unlimited world of his inner vision.

1946-47 saw a major stylistic and iconic break with his pictorial past triggered by the revelations of the horrors of the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and the beginnings of space exploration.  In a series of surrealist allegorical paintings, Sievan sought to explore and define humanity’s new relationship with Earth and its very existence in the universe.  Though he soon returned to the familiar world of nature, this contemplation of mankind’s existence and fate would soon reappear.

Just as Sievan was instinctively an expressionist, he was also drawn to the concepts of existentialism beginning to be a major influence on the art world.   His study of the writings of the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard (whose imaginary portrait he painted in 1959), increasingly influenced his painting.  His close friendships with Avery and Rothko and summers working in Provincetown (Rothko lent him his studio in the summer of 1960) and later in Woodstock brought him into the philosophical ferment of Abstract Expressionism.  Starting in 1958, he produced a series of dramatic large-scale figurative paintings dredged from the depths of his being probing the existentialist preoccupation with failure, dread and death and attempting to come to terms with the fears and scars of his childhood.  Exhibitions of these paintings in 1960, 1961 and 1962 resulted in purchases by MoMA, the collector Joseph Hirshhorn and other museums.

As a consequence of the physical and emotional toll taken by these paintings on their creator, Sievan never returned to full scale painting.  For the next nine years until shortly before his death in 1981, with health and mental stability failing, he produced an extraordinary body of scaled-down paintings, drawings and collages, none larger than a small sheet of paper, frequently executed on fragments of cardboard or scraps of paper.  These small works--vibrant abstracts, animals real and imagined, landscapes--summarized an entire creative life executed with easy skill, humor, passion and vitality: truly an epilogue to an art and life lived to the fullest.