School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Columbia University
Born in 1907 in Posen (now Poznan), Poland, Theodore Roszak was two years old when his family moved to Chicago, settling amid the city’s large Polish community. Roszak’s mother encouraged his early interest in art, and in 1920, he entered and won the Chicago Herald-Examiner’s National Art Contest for Public Schools.
Theodore Roszak pursued serious art study as a teenager, taking classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After finishing high school in 1924, Roszak enrolled at the Art Institute full time and won the school’s lithograph and Trebilcock awards in his first year. In 1926, he left Chicago briefly for New York, studied privately with George Luks, and took philosophy courses at Columbia University. An Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship in 1929 enabled Roszak to spend two years in Europe, where he saw the haunting paintings of Giorgio de Chirico for the first time. Based in Prague, Roszak also met and befriended Czech artists who introduced him to the principles of Bauhaus design and architecture, and he became familiar with the aesthetics and ideology of constructivism.
Roszak returned to the US in 1930, settling in New York City. He won a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship in 1931, set up a studio on Staten Island in 1932, and in 1933, the Whitney Museum of American Art included one of his works in their First Biennial of Contemporary American Painting. The following year, the Art Institute of Chicago gave him the Eisendrath Award for Painting, and in 1935, Roszak was again represented in the Whitney Biennial with his painting "Fisherman’s Bride" (1934), which the museum purchased.
That same year, the Roerich Museum’s International Art Center in New York gave Roszak his first solo exhibition. Like many American artists during the Depression, Roszak also found regular work through the Federal Art Project: he taught at the Design Laboratory, a tuition-free, experimental design school opened in 1935 under the aegis of the WPA. With an advisory board that included Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the Design Laboratory promoted Bauhaus and constructivist approaches to art. When the school closed, Roszak found work assisting Norman Bel Geddes at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.
During the second half of the 1930s, Roszak began working on constructions — sleek, free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures of plastic and wood rooted in pure geometric abstraction. However, constructivist ideology was informed by an optimistic faith in technology, and the destruction wreaked by the machinery of war left Roszak deeply critical of this perspective. In the mid-1940s, he abandoned his constructions, picked up an oxyacetylene torch, and began welding steel sculptures. His interest in welding emerged while he was employed at the Brewster Aircraft Corporation in Newark, New Jersey during the Second World War — from 1940 to 1945, Roszak had designed and fabricated aircraft, including an experimental bomber.
Although Roszak’s welded sculptures continued to be abstract, they were expressionistic rather than streamlined, inspired by the organic instead of the man-made. This shift was presaged in a series of gouaches he did in the early 1940s, which explored questions of myth and ritual, an interest he shared with mythologist Joseph Campbell, who was a colleague of Roszak’s at Sarah Lawrence College, where the artist taught from 1941 to 1955. In 1948, the Museum of Modern Art bought its first Roszak sculpture, "Spectre of Kitty Hawk" (1946 - 1947).
Roszak’s career continued to thrive throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, the Rodin Museum in Paris mounted an exhibition of his work, and Theodore Roszak, a traveling mid-career retrospective, was organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 1959, he received a grant from the Ford Foundation, New York and was included in the Images of Man exhibition at MoMA. As his career grew, so did the scale of his work and his interest in flight. In the late 1950s, Roszak created an aluminum eagle weighing a full ton with a wingspan of over thirty-five feet for the US Embassy building in London (designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1960).
For the 1964 World’s fair, Roszak welded his colossal Forms in Transit — a rocket-shaped, forty-three-foot sculpture comprised of aluminum, steel, and sheet metal — and in 1968, his twenty-five-foot bronze Sentinel was installed at the Public Health Laboratories on East 27th Street, New York. In 1969, Roszak began a six-year position as a member of the Fine Arts Commission, and in 1971, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome.
The artist died on September 2, 1981 in New York City, United States. Since 2008, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, in cooperation with Jeffrey Hoffeld Fine Art, has represented the estate of Theodore Roszak.
In 1969, Roszak began a six-year position as a member of the Fine Arts Commission, and in 1971, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome.
On October 24, 1931 Theodore Roszak married Florence Sapir.
