Gregory Masurovsky

Gregory Masurovsky (Nov. 26, 1929 - July 17, 2009) was an American graphic artist known for his distinctive black and white illustrations. A graduate of Black Mountain College, he lived most of his life in Paris with his wife, the abstract expressionist Shirley Goldfarb. He had a long professional and personal relationship with the French writer Michel Butor.
==Life and Career==
Masurovsky was born in the Bronx, New York City. His father, a Jewish emigree from Ukraine (orphaned, pogroms), fled to Germany and then America where he worked in sweatshops. A Jewish philanthropist helped the father who then went to Rutgers. He worked for a company that made ice cream. His mother’s parents were Russian and ran a general store. 
As a child, Masurovsky collected comic books and drew. At the age of 13 in 1942, he won a poster contest to support the war effort and had lunch with New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Masurovsky went to the High School of Music and Art. As a teenager, he did spot illustrations for the New York Times and other publications. His brother Disraeli, who encouraged Masurovsky’s artistic aspirations, led him to Black Mountain College. (Disraeli died at the age of 20.)
There he studied with the painter Ilya Bolotowsky and the poet M.C. Richards. Among his classmates: the painter Kenneth Noland, the director Arthur Penn and the writer Jame Leo Herlihy. There was a stint as an army medic at Fort Lewis, Florida during the Korean War, and later a job making props for the Ringling Bros. Circus in Florida. He then worked for the painter and graphic artist Will Barnett at the Arts Students League in New York. As an assistant in the lithography and etching classes, he displaced a young woman - Shirley Goldfarb.
She was “mad as a hatter,” Masurovsky said. She got over it. They went out. They got married and lived in a coldwater flat in the Bowery and hung out at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, a bar frequented by abstract expressionist painters (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc.) and Beat writers (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, etc.)
Somewhat impulsively, Masurovsky and Goldfarb sailed to Paris in 1954. They arrived at 1 a.m. May 26 and, thinking of Hemingway, went to the Le Dome Cafe. It was closed. They went to La Coupole and ran into the painter John Hutlberg, an acquaintance of Goldfarb’s. They stayed up all night and stayed in Paris for the rest of their lives.
They got a small place. The furniture folded up to turn the living space into a studio. (In 1974, the painter David Hockney did a portrait of Masurovsky and Goldfarb. Masurovsky is at a work table, pen in hand; on the other side of a wall, Goldfarb, in jacket, jeans and platform shoes, sits in a chair, staring off. Their little dog, Sardi, is at her feet, also staring off. The painting is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. They had a son, Marc Jean in 1956; they put him in daycare at three months so they had space to work in their small place. 
Masurovsky concentrated on pen and ink drawings. Early on, he sold some drawings. He was dropped by a gallery for not selling enough. He had at least 32 one-man shows between 1957 and 2007. He was part of 46 group exhibitions between 1957 and 2007. Between 1963 and 2004, he illustrated at least 40 books, including 15 with the French writer Michel Butor.
He taught classes. In 1966, he returned to America to teach at the College of Art and Design in Minneapolis. Masurovsky and Goldfarb showed their work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. She sold several paintings. She had sold only one in her previous 12 years in Paris. Still, despite the sales, Shirley, and Marc Jean, wanted to return to Paris. “...[It] wasn’t easy to assume the precarious ‘touch and go’ of the artist's life,” Masurovsky said. 
Goldfarb returned to visiting cafes and friends but suffered from the indifference to her art. In 1977, Goldfarb became ill. She died of cancer in 1980. She was 55. Per her wishes, she was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. To help with the economic strain, some collectors bought paintings. Masurovsky eventually returned to teaching. It “greatly helped me overcome my sorrow,” he said.
From 1980 until 1998, Masurovsky taught classes: at the American Center in Paris, at the International Summer Academy, Salzburg, Austria; in England and America.
His work is in the collections of, among others, the Georges Pompidou Center - MNAM; MOMA, New York; Brooklyn Museum; New York Public Library; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
In 2009, he had three exhibitions. The last closed on June 27. He died July 17. He was 79.
==Masurovsky on his art==
After returning to Paris from America in 1967, Masurovsky concentrated on portraits and still lifes:
“My pen, in those works, was tracing small horizontal lines that corresponded to the grid of pixels on a television screen, or the pattern of dots for reproducing a photograph in a newspaper. These small lines evoked wavelengths and vibrations in the air that contributed to a sentiment I had about the changing states of matter and the notion of impermanence in life, that forms appear and disappear, that what is called ‘permanent’ is nothing more than an ‘extended temporary,’ with the regrets or comfort such could inspire.”
Said Masurovsky: “I would like to leave a trace that cannot be erased, to touch with the pen the right position in space - this point charged with the force of the inevitable, of destiny."
Category:1929 births
Category:People from Bronx, New York
Category:American people
Category:Graphic artists
Category:2009 deaths