About Jack Goresko
THE LIFE AND WORK OF JACK GORESKO - FINE ARTIST
By Eben Goresko
INTRODUCTION
My brother and I, as a point of discussion, would often pose to each other the question why hadn’t our father made it as an artist? As kids and growing up, it was so clear to us that there was simply no other worthy calling for him in this world other than that of being a fine artist. We couldn’t understand…it simply didn’t make any sense to us how life gave him such a raw deal! Later on we shared a bond that grew from our belief in the worthiness of his work and the knowingness that someday his art would matter.
By the mid 1970’s, our family began to suffer a mini holocaust. Mother succumbed to early Alzheimer’s, being kept alive by feeding tube in a nursing home for twelve years. Simultaneously, father drifted into further depression and unreality which culminated in his death in 1991 from a Glioma seven months after my mother’s passing. During this same period my brother William broke his neck in an auto accident 1984, only to survive for another twenty four years. Our family life would never again be the same.
In the wake of this mayhem and misfortune, we had little time or ability to do anything but store his art work, which was as we found it after his passing, slowly wasting away on high acid paper sitting in ordinary cardboard boxes and grocery bags.
By the year 2000 we hired, with the little money we could muster, a paper expert to restore a portion of the work. After William’s death in 2008, I moved all the work to the Boulder, Colorado vicinity where I live. I built frames for fifty five of the works, which were finally exhibited at the Boulder JCC in March 2013.
Curiously, it seems that art can have a life of its own and that is how we find this collection back here, very close to the epicenter of my father’s psychological and cultural sensibilities.
In this short volume I include for you a bio of my father’s life, followed by excerpts from my brother’s unfinished memoirs that go further into his perspective on who our parents were and our family circumstances. Following that I include for you information about my father’s artistic style – capabilities and a sampling with brief descriptions of six of his notable art works will follow to conclude.
Jack Goresko, Fine Artist - Biography
Jack Goresko's story is part of a larger narrative of how Jews around the world have struggled against anti-Semitism. His encounters with anti-Semitism and provincialism in the Montreal art world ultimately led him to emigrate to the United States. While he never gained the fame he was worthy of as an artist, he nevertheless dedicated his life to his art and to his artistic vision.
The diverse themes of Jack’s art range from pastoral landscapes and still lives to emotionally-charged studies that reveal the angst of human existence under the most dire of circumstances. His illustrations and sketches, profoundly influenced by the Holocaust, reveal his keen observations of people, nature, and organic forms.
Early years
Jack Goresko was born in Montreal in 1916. The son of Jewish immigrants, he was remembered as "always having a pencil in hand." His father, a factory worker, saw his eldest son's artistic inclination as impractical, and neither understood nor approved. But Jack persisted, initially self-taught, he later attended the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.
In Montreal, Jack studied with Alexander Bercovitch, a Russian émigré painter, set designer, and teacher, known for his vibrant expressionist style. He also studied the works of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, da Vinci, and many of the Impressionist masters.
Living in exile
From the 1920s through '40s, art dealer and gallery owner Edmund Dyonnet virtually had a lock on art sales in Montreal. Dyonnet despised modernism and once declared he would never attend an exhibition that displayed paintings by Van Gogh, whose work he described as “fearful paintings of an insane man.” He favored artists such as Alphonse Jongers, who catered to the conservative taste of the Anglo-Protestant elite.
The styles promoted by Dyonnet and Jongers dominated the Montreal art market for decades, making it nearly impossible for Jewish artists like Jack Goresko and his teacher, Alexander Bercovitch, to break through. Both struggled under these circumstances.
Buoyed by Zionist zeal, Jack joined an artist’s colony around mid-1930, where he met his wife Susan. They married 1941 and spent the next ten years living a bohemian lifestyle between the Gaspe Peninsula and Hemmingford (Quebec), alternating between artists colonies and a farm with family friends.
Pursuing Art in the United States
Jack and Susan Goresko left Canada in 1950. They moved first to Chicago and then on to Philadelphia. As children came along, Jack temporarily put his art on hold to respond to the economic demands of raising a family. He was never again able to focus solely on his paintings and sketches.
“I remember that he always had his mind on art no matter what he was doing and was constantly mulling over myriad ideas for future efforts” shares Jack’s son Eben. He was adept as an illustrator, in pastels, oil, and watercolor, and he also had talent as a sculptor. His proficiency at sketching almost anything in just a few minutes was extraordinary.
Body of Work
The personal tragedy of his brother Willy’s death at the end of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust were major influences on Jack’s art. During and after the war he was in contact with Jewish Holocaust survivors. His thoughts, feelings and ideas about what he learned are captured in his image, irony and riddles, expressions and postures of his subjects.
Jack Goresko passed away in 1991 at the age of 74 years. Sadly, a great deal of his work remains unfinished and some of it tragically was lost. Still, his intense interest in and focus on the human condition, coupled with his keen eye for detail as evidenced in his pastoral landscapes live on through dozens of completed paintings and hundreds of sketches and archived studies.
Exhibition Details
The current collection of Jack Goresko’s art includes 55 mounted pieces in this exhibition and there are more than 500 digitized and archived studies, drawings, and sketches not including additional oil paintings and larger scale pastel and charcoal portraits and studies.
Many of Jack’s works were done on poor quality paper. Eben and William, who had the foresight to hire Keiko Miyamori, an expert paper restoration professional and artist in the employ of (at the time) “The Free Library of Philadelphia”, are thankful for her assistance on preserving these pieces currently on exhibition.
Subjects and Themes
Family portraits in pastel and pen and pencil
Human anatomy and figures
Character studies in pencil
Still-lifes
Insects
Animals
Crowds
In My Brother William’s Words Who were my parents?
“My father was a gifted artist, blessed with a prodigious talent that allowed him to capture the essence of his subject within moments of setting pencil to sketch pad. Refused admission to the prestigious "Art Institute of Chicago" because he lacked the academic credentials - his formal education hadn't progressed beyond the eighth grade - it was nevertheless suggested by the same institute that he was talented enough to be teaching anatomy in fine arts there.”
“Opposites attract? My father, shy and introverted was opposite in personality to my mother who was outgoing and physically active. Her physical prowess carried over into her persona making her capable of coming to a quick decision and following through. She was a born athlete who despite being barely five feet tall, excelled at sports such as swimming, diving (off of bridges), tennis, basketball (she played center), and skating. She was, as her passion for sports might suggest, aggressive and self-confident. Her brassy, devil-may-care exterior made her capable, even eager to tackle a tough challenge but beneath that tough exterior was a very sensitive nature.”
“Her overriding passion though was for skiing and it was with great pride that she spoke of nearly making the Canadian Olympic ski team back in the thirties. By then in her late twenties and past her prime as a downhill skier or perhaps being squeezed out due to the harsh economics of the time, she drifted into art classes at Montreal Jewish Y.”
“When it came to intellectual and artistic endeavors she was the quintessential dilettante. She was attracted by this mysterious world of the mind and spirit but unable to plumb its depths in any significant way. Nevertheless she enjoyed "dabbling" which is how she met my father. She dabbled her way into the class of a renowned Montreal artist, Alexander Bercovitch, whose star pupil was none other than my father.”
Just prior to and after leaving Montreal
“My mother had apparently taken it upon herself the task of helping my father to banish his demons and discover his artistic vision so as to facilitate his achievement of fame and fortune. They drifted through the years during and directly following WW II, living with parents and spending summers with some farmer friends, or teaching art at summer camp, subsisting on the odd job, regular and freelance to make their modest ends meet. The one constant that ran through this patchwork period holding it all together was my father at his easel or sketch pad working feverishly with watercolor, pastel and pen and ink or subsumed in the smell of turpentine and linseed oil as he struggled with that obstinate tempera, year after year spent in quest of greater mastery of technique in preparation for certain success… by his mid-thirties he had begun to produce some works which indicated that things seemed to be gelling. It was about then that I was born.”
Why leave Montreal?
“At the time of my birth, my parents had just moved to Philadelphia after a year spent trying to make a go of it in Chicago, where my father had an uncle. Their original point of departure had been Montreal, where they had been born and raised and which they felt offered little opportunity. Coming from the relatively calm and provincial civility of that city on the St. Lawrence to Philadelphia with its oppressive grid-like linearity, its foul industrial clamor, and its undertones of racial tension, was cultural shock of the first order.”
“They had also left Montreal in an attempt (as I discovered years later after their deaths going through some of their papers) to escape the meddling criticism of family members who couldn't understand their high-minded artistic strivings or the deferred child-raising that accompanied it.”
“After a one year pit stop in Chicago, they moved here on the urgings of a very close friend who had become a neurosurgeon and was doing his residency at the University of Pennsylvania. My father was favorably impressed by the city's artistic resources and perhaps secretly fancying himself a young Thomas Eakins, (like Eakins, his forte was anatomy) was soon busily drawing from the gallery overlooking his friend’s surgery.”
Welcome to reality?
“There followed a period of about five years during which we lived here and there while my father-parents attempted to make the transition from bohemian to breadwinner and my mother to…, well… a mother. First they opened up a small luncheonette convenience store in the Logan section of Philadelphia with money they borrowed from my father's mother. Juggling between minding the store and minding to the needs of a newborn infant proved a daunting task so my grandmother came down from Montreal to help my mother get her bearings.”
“But neither of my parents possessed the temperament necessary to run such a business. They lacked that certain cold eyed shopkeeper's mentality that assumes that every customer is a potential shoplifter. They placed too much trust in human nature and consequently they were robbed blind.”
“After the luncheonette folded, my father tried his hand at "direct sales." He became a Fuller Brush man. It was still the early post war, the atomic age, and with it sprang up a host of companies hawking products designed to revolutionize one's life; everything from vacuum cleaners to encyclopedias, and its foot soldier was the door to door salesman. But this was an even shorter lived venture for if there was one thing my father was not it was a pushy, hard-nosed high pressure artist with a bag of quick lines and a foot that jammed in the innocent victims door so as to keep them hostage while extolling the virtues of his product.”
“He then tried his hand at plumbing. This more suited his temperament for it required a fair degree of mental acuity, manual dexterity and determination all of which my father was abundantly endowed with. He got a job with "Mort and Co." as an apprentice plumber and over the next two years worked his way up to the position of “journeyman.” Then, just as he was becoming well versed in the use of solder, flux and oakum and how to cook lead to "wipe a joint", not to mention developing a familiarity with "elbows" and "nipples" (of the iron and copper variety), Mort went out of business. For whatever reason, my father was unable to find work with another plumber and as a last resort he tried the post office.”
Towards a more stable life and occupation
“About that time we were living in a housing project for low income families across from one of the largest refinery complexes on the east coast. I lived with my parents and baby brother in a house shaped somewhat like a wooden building block which was attached to others of the same shape, four and five to a row - new post war construction for low income families. These were the Tasker Homes. In the early fifties it was a relatively safe and thriving place, a haven for poor working class families, both white and black, a first step on the way up the ladder to middle class security.”
“My parents couldn't move out soon enough and when my father was able to find steady employment - a mail sorter working the night shift at the post office - they bought a house in an unassuming blue collar neighborhood nearby in the southeast corner of Philadelphia right by the Delaware River, across from New Jersey. It was a modest two story brick affair with a stone porch, a third bedroom and a basement: a decided improvement overall.”
“Once my father found a steady job that offered the kind of security that they desperately needed to enter the lower strata of the middle class and thus purchase a house, a new washer, refrigerator and a car and set their sites on raising the two of us. With my mother's entry into the work force some two or three years later, they became firmly ensnared in the post-war-baby-boom-rat-race and their bohemian days were over for good.”
Life in South Philadelphia
“The Philadelphia of the 1950's was and still is, though to a lesser degree, a city of strictly defined ethnic and racial boundaries that strongly reflected the flood of immigrants who had until forty years earlier been pouring in from nearby Ellis Island. It consisted of large sweeping sections that fragmented into smaller enclaves, some only several blocks wide and a dozen long, each with its own unique identity. The neighborhood in which we lived was typical of this phenomenon.”
“This little Irish neighborhood ended at Third Street, off of which we lived and defined the beginnings of another enclave. This was about five blocks wide ending at Eighth Street and was primarily Jewish. Through its heart ran a shopping district of small food stores; dairy, poultry, butchers, bakeries and other stores specializing in “dry goods”: clothing, fabrics and the like.”“We moved into this little house on Roseberry Street when I was five years old.
During those years my parents spent all of their energies alternately working and trying to expose us to as many cultural influences as possible. They hoped that like some exotic trees which have been transplanted to a desert, we would absorb all of this nurturing and bloom into their idealized versions of young Renaissance men, ("well rounded" as my mother would say) simultaneously excelling academically transforming into every Jewish mother's dream (from that era) a doctor.”
Job upgrade
“Early to mid 1960’s father becomes a government worker designated as an Illustrator – GS4 or 5, in the same government complex (The Defense Personnel and Supply Center) that mother works in. The nature of his work there was entirely canned. I recall hearing conversations between my parents. He spoke of how his fellow “illustrators” colleagues were continually baffled by his abilities and would routinely rely upon him to satisfactorily complete their assigned projects. Perhaps a small victory but in the end he was only slightly more appreciated for his abilities and work there than in the postal service.”
Our parents - summary
“With the benefit of hindsight and the vaporous wisdom that accompanies it, I can understand that they loved us very much and they showed it in the only way in which they were capable: by attempting to instill in us a love for art and culture, and by steering us in the direction of academic achievement which according to their most cherished ideals would set us on the path to attain the fulfillment and security which had so eluded them.”
Quick Summary of General Features and Observations to Take Note of Regarding My Fathers Work
1. A comprehensive overview of Jack Goresko’s work reveals his fascination with the human condition. His preoccupation with the Holocaust lends a somber quality to much of his work, from his detailed landscapes to his allegorical depictions and portraits. His style of minimalist expressionism pierces the veil of his often-unwitting subjects’ personae in order to connect with their essence.
2. Jack Goresko was a master of pencil art. He could render a fairly complete sketch of anything within a few minutes; in some cases in mere moments. He sketched during intervals between mundane tasks, from waiting in the car, to lunch breaks to transporting children to and from school. He continually studied human and animal anatomy, and drew countless tiny miniatures to flesh out the compositional intricacies of his ideas and subject matter.
3. Jack Goresko’s greatest strength as an artist lay in his ability to grasp the essence of what it is to be human, and to convey that in his art through gestures, facial expressions, and subtle articulations of the physical form. His indirect but deeply felt connection to the horrors of the Holocaust brought his attention to cruelty and suffering, and much of his art was filled with powerfully evocative renderings of the darker side of human nature.
4. A sampling of some examples of Jack Goresko’s most compelling work includes: Rittenhouse Square This work marries the human and man-made worlds to the natural world. Careful attention to composition and detail in combination with subtle use and contrast between light and darkness create a detached and somber effect.
Alone The contrast between an oblivious group of people and the lone, despondent woman two feet away is a timeless statement about isolation and loneliness. There is an existential quality to this piece, as there is with many of his works and in it lay his true genius of conception. The subject matter and content of this work depict a common scene that occurs all the time any place anywhere, past and present.
King of Death Jack Goresko breaks Holocaust fine arts tradition in his portrayal “King of Death.” Via minimalist expressionism, this work takes on the form of an icon. His mentor, Alexander Bercovitch, who was a master of the icon and used it as a basis for much of his work may have been one of Jack’s influences in approaching this type of subject matter in this manner.
Talking With Dead This Holocaust-inspired portrait of a grotesque, horrified man gazing upon walking skeletons is non-literal non-representational. It reveals Jack Goresko’s focus on maximum expression via the human form. His settings are more allegorical than most Holocaust-related art.
The Smokers This work transports the viewer to another era and presents subject matter as a timeless distillation of smokers and smoke. Smoke is as alive and on an equal footing as the smokers. Once again there is no literal context or indexing of who, where or when these smokers smoke. The focus lay totally on human expressions, forms and the natural forces.
Montreal Snow This rendition of the Jewish district of Montréal is counterpart to the same scene prior to a snowstorm. Its detail and colors accurately portray winter in this Canadian city.
On a Personal Note
Bringing this collection forward has been an arduous and unforgiving task yet not for a moment have I ever given myself the option to do otherwise as it records my family journey as well as the perils faced by so many others past and present. It tells a story that continues to unfold. I see it as an evolving and ongoing variation on a theme - a tiny speck of light that glitters within the reflection of a broader context.