Chaim Gross (1904-1991) Ukrainian Born American, Litho/Pencil. Titled: ?Woman And Flowers?. An image of a woman standing in a field of flowers. Signed, Lower Right Overall Size: 25 1/4 x 18 3/4 in. Sight Size: 18 1/2 x 12 in. #2002. A sculptor originally from Austria, Chaim Gross is best known for his lively, naturalistic, often interlocking figure compositions, carved in South American hardwood. Gross emigrated to New York, arriving on April 14, 1921. While there he studied for six months at the free art academy in Budapest. However, in 1920, the government of Hungary was overthrown, and Gross, as a Jewish alien was held in a detention camp but ultimately ended up in Vienna where he enrolled in the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) and studied drawing for almost a year. In 1922 he began sculpture and drawing classes at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design where Elie Nadelman, from whom he studied modeling in clay from the live model, became his most influential teacher. From that time, Chaim Gross claimed the human figure as his most important subject, and shortly after he determined that direct wood carving was the appropriate technique for him. Gross stayed with this commitment to wood carving until the late 1950s when he switched to bronze. His early bronzes were cast from wood carvings and, as a result, resembled wood carving. In 1959, several of his bronzes were exhibited in a retrospective, "Four American Expressionists," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. In some of his later work, Gross used Hebrew iconography, which expressed his renewed emotional attachment to Judaism and the losses he experienced from the Holocaust. From 1950 to 1957 he carved seven variations in wood on the theme "Lot's Wife", and "Naomi and Ruth" was carved in stone in 1956. With the Soyer brothers in those early New York days, he went to Woodstock and Provincetown, and became especially active in Provincetown where he did numerous watercolor scenes. His first exhibition was in 1926 at a group show at the Independent Students Gallery, New York City, and his first solo show was in March 1932 at Gallery 144 in Greenwich Village. Although he lived and worked on the Lower East Side during the Depression era and was a participant in the New York Public Works Project of the WPA artist, his human figure subjects did not reflect social or political themes. In 1934, he became an American citizen. Among his commissions was a monument four-figure plaster group, "Harvest", for the courtyard of the France Overseas building at the New York World's Fair, and also "Line-man", for the Finland building. In the 1940, at the fair, he carved a "Ballerina" statue from an imbuya wood. He worked before audiences, totaling over 100,000 people, and provided explanation of his processes. "Ballerina" is now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. After World War II, he received numerous commissions from synagogues and from the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. In addition to sculpting, Gross was also a teacher. From 1927 to 1987, he taught sculpture at the Educational Alliance School in New York City, and from 1948, at the New School of Social Research.