AW796: Charles Ezekiel Polowetski "Man In Boat" Modernist Oil on Canvas

Charles Ezekiel Polowetski "Man In Boat" Modernist Oil on Canvas. Retains museum inventory control number verso. Dated 1931 verso.

Dimensions: Sight 30" x 36"; Frame 34 1/4" x 40 1/4"

Comments: Born in Bielsk, Poland in 1884, Polowetski immigrated to the US in 1892. He grew up in New York city amidst harrowing conditions; when ten years old and a ward of the Deborah Nursery and Child’s Protectory—which provided day care for poor working parents—Polowetski and two other boys were “locked in the cellar of the institution and after being flogged tied to gas pipes and left prisoners in the dark hole” (“He Flogged the Children”). Given this childhood his subsequent career is remarkable: at age sixteen he studied with Robert Frederick Blum  at the National Academy of Design, then in 1903 after receiving a scholarship with Leon Bonnat  at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he became friends he became friends with painters like Bernard Gussow and Samuel Halpert, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, and eventually maintained a studio up to and during the Great War before fleeing in 1915. Plowetski’s efforts at returning to France in 1919 reveal efforts on his behalf by fellow painters George Elmer Brown and Oscar Miller. Polowetski was a member of the Salmagundi Club and, while in Paris, of the American Art Association. His vivid landscapes and portraits were exhibited in American venues like the Corcoran Gallery, the Salons of America, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In all likelihood he made his living as a portraitist, receiving commissions by bank officers, industrialists, university presidents, governors, and the like; among his FAP works is one of the pilot and explorer Floyd Bennett, for whom a New York airport was named. In 2008 Polowetski’s NDG painting “December in Venice,” loaned for exhibition at the Mills Mansion, Mt. Morris, was stolen and has yet to be recovered. After World War II Polowetski moved to Santa Fe and began painting in the American southwest, then lived the final years of his life in California. He died in San Francisco in 1955. One work at the National Portrait Gallery . Five more images at FAP.