Who was Arthur Szyk?
Arthur Szyk (pronounced Shick) was a child art prodigy who received his formal art education in Paris and Krakow as a teenager. His first art exhibitions were held in Paris at the Galeries A. Decour in the early 1920s. He was regarded in Europe as a master of the medieval technique of manuscript illumination, but became equally famous for his searing political caricatures during World War II. Szyk immigrated to America from his native Poland via London in 1940 to emphasize the need for US involvement in the fight against Nazism. From the moment of his arrival his work appeared everywhere: magazine covers, newspapers, books, posters, corporate advertising, and in art galleries and museums. Numerous one-man shows were held in New York in the 1940s including exhibitions at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co, Andre Seligmann, Inc., and Messrs. Wildenstein & Co., and at The Philadelphia Art Alliance. In the 1930s and 40s Szyk's art was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor as well as at the Library of Congress. Szyk, who admired the United States since his childhood, became a US citizen in 1948. His life was devoted to creating visual art that often exposed the cruelty of injustice and dramatized the struggle for freedom and human dignity.

Why does this art look familiar?
Szyk's work covered such a wide subject range and was so extensively published that as a child you may have owned a copy of his illustrated Andersen's Fairy Tales, The Arabian Nights Entertainments, The Canterbury Tales, or seen a copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam in your local library. Some might remember his Pathways through the Bible while others might remember holding in their hands a copy of his magnificent Passover Haggadah or seeing his illuminated Proclamation of Independence of Israel hanging in their parents' home. Older individuals might recall Szyk's covers for Colliers magazine, his illustrations in Esquire, his infamous December 1941 Pearl Harbor cover of Yamamoto for Time, or his hundreds of cartoons for New York newspapers such as the New York Post or PM.

And yet I've never heard of him?
Szyk was not part of any school of art, nor was there any School of Szyk. His name is hard to pronounce, and hence difficult to remember. When he died at a young age of 57 (in 1951), his family did not effectively promote his art. A substantial number of his paintings were quickly sold at four successive Parke Bernet sales by his wife from 1959 to 1965, and the public presence of his art vanished almost instantaneously. Szyk's realist WWII political art and his style of medieval miniatures were not part of the art scene following the War, and hence not in the public eye. And, if one wanted to read about Szyk, there were no books to which one could turn to learn about this remarkable artist.

Why Szyk? Why now?
Since the early 1990s, a Szyk renaissance has been kindled. An Arthur Szyk Society was founded, major one-man exhibitions have been held in prominent museums, books about the artist have been published, scholarly art history papers have been written, and documentaries, including a PBS special, have been made. Szyk's talents, themes, brilliance and genius have an eternal quality and now once again, more than one-half century after his death, his art is being recognized for its uniqueness and greatness.

International attention is also being paid to Szyk. Last year, an exhibition of Szyk's art, organized in the US, traveled to three cities in Poland. And a major exhibition is in planning at a prominent European museum, scheduled to open in the Fall 2008.

Where can Szyk's art be seen today?
This past October through January, Szyk's art was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum side by side with renowned book illustrators Maxfield Parrish, Kate Greenaway, and Walter Crane. Collections of his art reside at the Library of Congress, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (Hyde Park), The Jewish Museum, Yeshiva University Museum, U.S. Naval Academy Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There are also several important private collections of his art today.