Harold Tovish

Tovish was born in New York City to a Russian refugee father. His father died during the Great Depression and his destitute mother placed his older sisters in foster care and sent young Tovish to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York. He took drawing classes that were sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Around age 16, Tovish finished his first sculpture, which then set the direction of his career. He received a scholarship and studied at the Columbia University School of the Arts where he studied with Oronzio Maldarelli.{{cite web |url=http://lod.isi.edu/page/person/4845 |title=Harold Tovish at Smithsonian American Art Museum |publisher=Smithsonian Institution American Art Museum |accessdate=July 19, 2013 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://archive.today/20130719194056/http://lod.isi.edu/page/person/4845 |archivedate=July 19, 2013 |df=mdy-all }} At Columbia, he also met Marianna Pineda. He earned his degree in 1943.

Tovish was in Minneapolis-St Paul for a number of years around 1950, probably with the University of MN art department. (He and Marianna were family friends.)

Tovish was sent to Europe by the United States Army during World War II. Upon returning in 1946, he married Pineda. He traveled to Paris with Ossip Zadkine, as well as Florence to study sculpture and drawing. After living in Europe for three years, the couple established residence and a studio in Boston in 1957.{{cite web|url= http://www.bu.edu/bostonia/spring08/obituaries/ |title=Bostonia: Obituaries: Faculty Members Remembered |publisher=Boston University |date=Spring 2008 |accessdate=July 27, 2013 }}

Tovish was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1965. In 1967, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Tovish taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tovish was College of Fine Arts professor at Boston University from 1971 until his retirement in 1983.

After his wife died in 1996, Tovish completed no works. He died of complications of a stroke one year after moving out of Boston to a retirement home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The early work of Tovish focused on the horror he witnessed as a soldier during World War II. In the early 1950s, he became concerned with the destructive consequences of science and technology, portraying humankind confronted with the machinery of "progress".

Hilton Kramer described Tovish's 28 sculptures and 20 drawings that were exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as "tedious, banal, and egregiously secondhand ... the work of a provincial artist – no doublt adept in technique, but woefully deficient in ideas or imagination."{{cite news|first=Hilton |last=Kramer |title=Sculpture: Talent Above the Fashions |newspaper=The New York Times |page=29 |date=May 18, 1968 }}

According to his daughter, Nina, Tovish "held himself to an extremely high standard and was ruthless about it" and as a consequence "he didn't leave behind a great body of work. He threw out 99 percent of everything he made." He also requested that family members destroy all of his unfinished works upon his death.

A retrospective display of six bronze sculptures organized by the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park of the artist's face and head showed a range of styles, including cubism and surrealism, as well as what was described as "contemporary biomorphic abstraction".{{cite web| url=http://newcambridgeobserver.wordpress.com/tag/harold-tovish/ |publisher=New Cambridge Observer |title=Review: Pushing a transparent envelope at the DeCordova |date=April 29, 2009 |accessdate=July 19, 2013 }}

• [http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=5912 The Museum of Modern Art]
• [http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Tovish,+Harold The Art Institute of Chicago]
• [http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/harold-tovish Walker Art Center]

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• {{cite book|first=Michael |last=Mazur |title=Harold Tovish: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1948–1988 |publisher=The Addison Gallery of American Art |year=1988 }}
• {{cite book |first=Virginia M. |last=Mecklenburg |title=Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection |publisher=Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art |year=1987 |isbn=9780874746914 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/modernamericanre0000meck }}

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Category:1921 births

Category:2008 deaths

Category:Sculptors from New York City

Category:Sculptors from Boston

Category:American people of Russian descent

Category:Columbia University School of the Arts alumni

Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology fellows

Category:Boston University people

Category:United States Army personnel of World War II

Category:20th-century American sculptors

Category:20th-century American male artists

Category:American male sculptors

Category:School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts faculty

Category:Sculptors from New York (state)

Category:Boston expressionism