City Lights II

Philip Howard Evergood

Evergood print cataloguer Lucy Lippard commented on this piece: "The year 1940-41, when Evergood was resident artist at Kalamazoo College, seems to have been one of his few periods of even slight involvement with landscape. During that year he made an etching, a zincograph, and a chalk drawing (figs. 158-61) of the same subject--the meeting of rural and industrial areas on the outskirts of a midwestern town. ...Of the three media used in Kalamazoo the zincograph was most suited to the subject, its grainy, smoky quality better evoking the bleak atmosphere." (P. 30, The Graphic Work of Philip Evergood, Lippard, 1966).

Philip Howard Evergood, painter, printmaker, sculptor, teacher and writer, was born Howard Blashki in New York City on October 26, 1901. His father, Meyer Evergood, was an artist and his mother, Flora Jane Blashki, was a well-educated English woman. His parents were financially cut off from their families when they married out of their religions.

Evergood was raised in London where he lived with his parents from 1909 until 1923. He studied mainly at Eton and Cambridge University and, after deciding to be an artist, he went to the Slade School where he studied with Henry Tonks and Havard Thomas. In 1923 he returned to New York and studied at the Art Students League with George Luks and William von Schlegell.

By 1925, Evergood was living in Paris where he studied at the Academie Julian with Laurens and also with Andre Lhote. At the end of that decade, he had returned to Paris and worked with Stanley William Hayter at his graphic workshop Atelier 17. By the mid 1930s Evergood was living in New York and worked as a muralist for the W.P.A. Federal Art Project, and he became one of the leading social realists in New York City.

In 1942, after a medical emergency forced his hospitalization in 1941, Evergood completed his major mural "The Bridge of Life" in Welles Hall at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, begun while on a Carnegie Corporation Grant. The left side of the mural represented the working day, specifically referencing the paper mills, a major industry in Kalamazoo for over 100 years. The right side of the mural represented Kalamazoo College. The center focused on the community welcoming the students of Kalamazoo College.

Philip Evergood died in Bridgewater, Connecticut on March 11, 1973.