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)

Works by this artist (9 items)

Edward Hopper, Ryder's House, 1933, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Henry Ward Ranger through the National Academy of Design, 1981.76
Ryder’s House
Date1933
oil on canvas
On view
Edward Hopper, People in the Sun, 1960, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.61
People in the Sun
Date1960
oil on canvas
On view
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.92
Cape Cod Morning
Date1950
oil on canvas
On view
Edward Hopper, (Standing Nude), n.d., charcoal on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Exchange with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972.16
(Standing Nude)
Daten.d.
charcoal on paper
Not on view