A Brief History of Maurice Golubov

In 1915, with the onset of WWI, the family became refugees and set out to immigrate to the United States — a harrowing odyssey of deprivation and suffering. Maurice became separated from his family, joining other “wild children,” surviving over two months, eventually reaching Petrograd where he was miraculously reunited with his family. In 1917 they finally arrived in America, settling in Brooklyn.

Golubov recalled receiving a present of watercolors for his 13th birthday and he began experimenting with geometric designs and color combinations that were alarmingly like Russian Constructivist images. He had never visited an art museum. In 1918 he began attending evening art classes in a neighborhood settlement house which were taught by John Sloan. In 1919, at the age of 14, he dropped out of regular school to pursue a career of art — much against the wishes of his father. Thinking work in a commercial art studio would advance his art education, he landed a job with a fashion studio that specialized in fashion illustrations for mail-order catalogs such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. While there he also met a visiting artist, Mark Tobey, who advised him to apply to the National Academy of Design, where he began attending classes five nights a week.

During this period, 1920-23, without any knowledge of fellow Russians like Kandinsky, and being self-taught with no formal fine art training, Golubov began painting abstract art with geometric forms. He would fill the margins of his academic life drawings with small abstractions, a practice his teachers puzzled over. They objected but he was a good student so they let him alone. 

By 1928 he had saved enough money to quit his day job and moved to a studio at 10 East 14th Street, an area where a number of other artists resided and worked, known as the Fourteenth Street School. In the twenties these were mainly realist artists such as Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh. He showed for the first time with The Eight, and also The Independents. He also spent summers in Woodstock where he was generally unimpressed with the “dull mediocrity” of the local artist’s work. 

However, he did meet artists such as David Smith, Milton Avery and Yasuo Kunioshi, who he admired and who helped him to further develop his abstract works. During the Depression, the money he had saved from his fashion studio job allowed him to avoid employment with the WPA — where so many artists had to turn for a livelihood. He frequented the 42nd Street Library, the 57th Street galleries, all the museums and attended sketch classes. He also attended meetings of the Marxist oriented John Reed Club, where he met, among others, Ad Reinhardt, who championed his work in the forties and included a Golubov “leaf ” in his famous cartoon tree drawing of 1946, How to Look at Modern Art.

Through the 1940s he continued to meet other artists including Giorgio Cavallon, Mark Rothko, Ilya Bolotowsky, William Baziotes, Louise Nevelson, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb and others. The 1950s brought more museum success with inclusion in Fifty Years of Abstract Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and a subsequent European tour. The Whitney included him in the 1951 shows, Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings and the Whitney Annual of American Painting. He had a second solo exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, his first had been in 1943. 

In 1962 he participated in Recent Painting USA: The Figure at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1944 Betty Parsons offered him a show of his abstract work at the well-regarded Mortimer Brandt Gallery. Virginia Zabriskie included him in a 1956 exhibition, Artists in Two Mediums. She followed with two solo shows, one of his figurative and the other of abstract works. In 1975 he began working with the legendary dealer Tibor de Nagy, who had great respect for the artist and commercial success with the work. Tibor was responsible for Golubov’s first retrospective museum show at the age of 75. 

A Brief History of Maurice Golubov (1905-1987)
Estate works now on view at McCormick Gallery, Chicago
www.thomasmccormick.com