Lilith

Reuben Kadish

This dynamic surreal intaglio - dimensional, energetic, touching on objective and reeling back into the fully abstract - is a prime example of the early influence of Abstract Expressionism and a precursor to Reuben Kadish’s exploration of sculpture. He uses a multitude of textures to suggest everything animalistic forms to smooth objects that appear carved from stone, and throughout, a thread of untethered automatic line springs forward, connecting the disparate elements in an elaborate dance. Kadish would continue to be drawn to the sculptural in all of his print work, even when depicting trees and still lifes. No matter what the medium, a sensuous dimensionality remained.

As a WPA artist during the Great Depression, Kadish executed the brilliant and still extant A Dissertation on Alchemy mural in the Chemistry Building at San Francisco State University in 1937. It proved to be his solo San Francisco commission despite submitting twenty odd designs for the WPA. "[My designs] were too flamboyant, too revolutionary, too this, too that," recalled Kadish in an Archives of American Art interview.

Reuben Kadish was born in Chicago, Illinois on 29 January 1913. His father was a decorative painter who specialized in marbling and faux-bois painting for interiors. His family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1921 and Kadish began private art lessons with Lorser Feitelson.

In 1930, he enrolled in the Otis Art Institute, studying alongside fellow student Phillip Goldstein [later Philip Guston]. Kadish won a studio scholarship to the Stickney School of Art in Pasadena for 1931. Politically vocal, Kadish’s pluck caught the attention of Jackson Pollock that same year and they became close friends. Together they explored the ethnographic treasures in the Los Angeles County Museum that would greatly influence Kadish’s work.

Kadish stated that he and Goldstein were invited by Siqueiros to come down to Mexico and paint murals. The two artists traveled to Mexico in 1935 and painted a fresco at the University of Michoacán in Morelia. Upon its completion, Siqueiros proclaimed, “It is my honest belief that Phillip Goldstein and Reuben Kadish are the most promising young painters in either the U.S. or Mexico.”

In 1936, Kadish moved to San Francisco and Goldstein moved to New York and changed his name to Philip Guston. Kadish joined the mural painting division of the FAP/WPA and his most important contribution was his fresco, A Dissertation on Alchemy, at the San Francisco State College Science Hall. That same year Kadish and Guston became active members of the American Artists Congress in response to the spread of fascism. In 1940, Kadish studied intaglio printmaking with Stanley William Hayter at the California School of Fine Arts.

Kadish was recruited into the U.S. Army artists unit and dispatched to India and Burma and, as a war correspondent, he recorded in drawing the horrors that war brings upon a culture. Upon his discharge in 1945, Kadish moved to New York where he worked as a printer at Hayter’s Atelier 17. He made his own prints but in 1946 he dropped out of the art world and settled on a farm in New Jersey and became a dairy farmer. After five years he began working in clay and sculpture. He returned to New York and studied at the Brooklyn Museum School and taught at Cooper Union. An invitation to work at Tamarind in Los Angeles was the impetus for Kadish's return to printmaking in 1961.