Artist

Harold Tovish

born New York City 1921-died Albuquerque, NM 2008

Born: New York, New York, United States
Died: Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
Active in: Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States

Biography: Harold Tovish is a sculptor who works in bronze, wood, and synthetic media. He attended WPA art classes in the late 1930s and studied with Oronzio Maldarelli at Columbia University, then went to Paris to work with Ossip Zadkine. Tovish's early work reflects his experiments with figurative naturalism, which he often used to express themes of victimization. In 1949 his ideas became explicit in a series of figures that captured the horror he felt as a soldier exposed to Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. Throughout his work Tovish seeks to unify form and content, placing heads or fragments of heads within spaces that function variously as refuges, prisons, or symbols of technological or societal entrapment. In the early 1950s, Tovish moved to Boston where he has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at Boston University. He spent 1965 as artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)
: Luce Artist Biography
In a career that spanned sixty years, Harold Tovish became one of the country's eminent sculptors. He spent much of his childhood at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City, where he took drawing classes sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. He later attended Columbia University and traveled to Paris on the GI Bill. Tovish had a long-standing interest in the human body as a subject and vehicle for ideas. His early work focused on the horror he witnessed as a soldier during World War II. In the early 1950s, he became concerned with the destructive consequences of science and technology, portraying humankind confronted with the machinery of "progress." Tovish stopped making sculpture in 1996 after the death of his wife and fellow sculptor, Marianna Pineda, on whose artistic feedback he relied heavily. Known for exacting standards, he refused to complete many sculptures he began and requested that family members destroy all of his unfinished works upon his death.

Works by this artist (4 items)

Harold Tovish, Random Elements, 1979, wood/cut, assembled and glued on integral base, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.81

Random Elements

Artist

Date1979

wood/cut, assembled and glued on integral base

Harold Tovish, Ceremonial Axe Head, 1977, bronze on wood base, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.80

Ceremonial Axe Head

Artist

Date1977

bronze on wood base

Harold Tovish, In Memoriam, 1984, hydrocal and gravel on wood base, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1985.82.4A-V

Artist

Date1984

hydrocal and gravel on wood base

Harold Tovish, Particles II, 1971, pen and ink and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1985.30.64

Artist

Date1971

pen and ink and pencil on paper