page_title: Todros Geller
section_title: Art and activism
hierarchical_section_title: Todros Geller / Career / Art and activism
caption_attribution_description: From Land to Land - Hassidic.
context_page_description: Todros Geller was a Jewish American artist and teacher best known as a master printmaker and a leading artist among Chicago’s art community.
context_section_description: In 1923, the Chicago Hebrew Institute's Observer (a forerunner of today's Jewish Community Center's), included Geller as one of the "many well known artists" to have their works listed in an art exhibit catalogue.
  Geller was one of the founding members of "Around the Palette" in Chicago in 1926, a club where artists shared their personal views of art and its role in society. The club became the "American Jewish Art Club", in 1940 and subsequently the "American Jewish Artists Club" in the early 1990s. Other founding members included Emil Armin, David Bekker, Aaron Bohrod, Fritzi Brod, Samuel Greenburg, William S. Schwartz, Maurice Yochim and Louise Dunn Yochim.
  In 1929, Geller visited Palestine, where he was inspired to paint Biblical themes such as his painting Jerusalem the Old which was included in the catalogue of the Art Institute of Chicago's thirty-third annual exhibition. He also created a woodcut series entitled Seven Palestinian motifs cut on wood in 1930.
  In 1931, Geller provided illustrations for Rose G Lurie's book, The Great March: Post Biblical Jewish Stories, a selection of Jewish stories for children covering the period from the destruction of the First Temple to the expulsion from Spain. The book was published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and was intended to cultivate "a love for Jewish heroes, for the Jewish people, and for Jewish idealism." John Drury, in his 1931 review of the Cafe Royale, "an intellectual and artistic rendezvous of the west side Jewish quarter", for his book Dining in Chicago,  included "Todros Geller, the wood-block artist" as one of the "local Jewish celebrities in the arts and allied
  interests" who dined there.
  In 1932, Geller participated in the Grant Park Art Fair organized by Adeline Loebdell Atwater, Chicago's first open-air art fair.
  According to Sarah Abrevaya Stein, professor of history and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA, inexpensive reproductions of Geller's art were popular with Chicago's Jewish Left in the 1930s, particularly a picture of a traditionally dressed Jewish man standing below the tracks of one of Chicago's elevated trains.
  Geller regarded art as a tool for social reform. In 1936, he signed the call for the first American Artists' Congress "Against War and Fascism". In the summer of 1936, the Chicago Society of Artists published their first annual block-print calendar called The Artist Calendar – 1937 that featured woodcuts by 30 Chicago artists, including Geller. The calendar project was intended to raise funds for the society activities and expose Chicago artists to a wider audience.
  He was the most prominent of the 14 graphic artists who participated in A Gift to Biro-Bidjan in 1937, an album of 14 woodcuts produced as a fund-raising project for the Chicago ICOR (whose acronym comes from the Yiddish name for the Association for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union) to support the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Geller's contribution to the portfolio was a woodcut based on Raisins and Almonds, the Yiddish lullaby written by Abraham Goldfaden in 1880 for his operetta Shulamis. The woodcut shows several scenes as a boy grows up and travels from Eastern Europe to Chicago: the boy's mother and a goat surrounding his cradle, the boy studying, the grown man walking with a sack on his back passing an open market, the man working as a tailor to earn money to immigrate to the New World, and a scene of an elevated train and the smokestacks of Chicago with unemployed workers demonstrating with banners and flags. The last scene, on the theme of new hope, shows the man standing looking up and grasping a newly planted tree. The other artists who contributed woodcuts were Alex Topchevsky, William Jacobs, Aaron Bohrod, David Bekker, Louis Weiner, Mitchell Siporin, Edward Millman, Fritzi Brod, Bernece Berkman, Morris Topchevsky, Abraham Weiner, Raymond Katz, and Ceil Rosenberg.
  In 1937, Shteyn published a volume of about sixty woodcuts by Geller called From Land to Land, produced as part of the Federal Art Project (FAP), the visual arts arm of
caption: Hassidic (1927)
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