inventor painter printmaker sculptor
Boris Margo was born in Wolotschick, Ukraine in 1902, and grew up in a middle-class family with four other siblings. He became interested in painting at an early age, but the revolutionary movements in Russia made access to art materials difficult.
Boris Margo studied at the Polytechnik of Art in Odessa from 1918 to 1923. The following year, with the help of grants, he participated in Futemas (Workshop for the Art of the Future) in Moscow and in 1927, studied with cubist painter Pavel Filinov, at the Analytical School of Art in St. Petersburg. In 1928, the Soviet government granted Margo permission to study abroad.
Boris traveled to North America, living in Montreal, Canada, where he worked as a muralist for a year before immigrating to the United States in 1930. Margo made New York City his home, and in 1940, he also began spending summers in a tiny cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
The pull that surrealism had on Margo in Europe strengthened in the United States, where the style was gaining momentum, thanks to an influx of artists fleeing the rising tide of European fascism. In New York, Margo worked as an assistant to Arshile Gorky, and he befriended a circle of artists that included Mark Rothko, with whom Margo shared an apartment in the 1940s. Too poor to afford painting materials, Margo innovated with “decalcomania”, a process in which he used automatism to select and assemble fragments of print and images from magazines.
Margo’s material deprivation led him to experiment with other processes as well, and he was perhaps most celebrated for developing the cellocut, a form of printmaking that became popular in the 1960s, decades after Margo’s innovation. The technique involved dissolving sheet celluloid in acetone to create a viscous liquid that Margo would pour onto a smooth surface like Masonite, wood, or metal in order to create a raised surface. The thicker the solution, the heavier the surface would become. Once the celluloid solidified, Margo could alter the surface with standard etching and woodcut tools or use acetone to break down areas of the hardened celluloid. The etched plates could then be run through a press or printed by hand. Typically, Margo would “line up variously colored inks onto a plate, apply a roller to the colors to mix them, ink the cellocut with the blended pigments, and print the now multicolored plate in a single run through the press.” In 1942, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the cellocut Floating Objects Illuminated; in 1945, the Brooklyn Museum also acquired a cellocut; and in 1946, the Philadelphia Print Club awarded him a Mildred Boericke Purchase Prize for one of his cellocut prints.
In the late 1940s, Margo arrived at his mature style — “a semi-abstract blending of shapes and atmospheric spaces notable for intricacy and warm flashes of color”, — and his career steadily rose. In 1947, Margo joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, and participated in the group exhibition "The Ideograph Picture", which also included work by Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still, and Theodoros Stamos. While Margo’s work encompassed biomorphism in the 1940s and calligraphy in the 1950s, his debt to surrealism remained apparent in both his visual style and his conception of art.
In 1946, Margo was a visiting artist at American University in Washington; he spent two years as a visiting professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during 1957 - 1959; and he was invited to be a visiting artist and professor at several other prestigious institutions. Even after his financial status improved and he was able to paint more often, Margo continued to make cellocuts, for which he received acclaim, winning purchase prizes from the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1947, 1953, 1955, 1960, and 1964. In 1968, Margo suffered a stroke that incapacitated him, but he continued to exhibit his work internationally, in group and solo shows, until his death in Hyannis, Massachusetts in 1995.
Abstract Composition in Black & Purple
From Thoughts of Alchemy
Expanding
Thermal Forces
Dawn Dance
Portrait of My Mother
From an Omnious Chord
Trajectory of Dawn
July 21
Corralled
Ignes Fatui
The Alchemist
Lookout
From November Nights
Black Light
Pleistocene Monarchs #2
Enchanted Beach
Dancers
Untitled MR196
Untitled MR141
Echoed Forms
Boris Margo adhered to the artistic traditions of Surrealism.
Quotations: “During those years of war and revolution in the Soviet Union, Invention, daughter of Necessity, become the habitual companion of my art thinking.”
Margo married Jan Gelb in 1941.
