Philip Evergood | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

Philip Evergood (1901-1973)

Philip Evergood created a rich oeuvre drawing from Surrealism and Social Realism to define his own idiom, a wholly unique oeuvre in twentieth-century art. Born in New York City in 1901 as Philip Blashki, Evergood was raised, in part, in his mother’s native England. There the family legally changed its name to Evergood in order to sound less “foreign” to American and English (and presumably anti-Semitic) ears. (1) Evergood studied at Eton and Cambridge, and then enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied drawing with Henry Tonks. In his early 20s, he traveled and studied, first in New York at the Art Students League, with George Luks, and at the Educational Alliance, where classmates included Chaim Gross and Moses Soyer. Then Evergood proceeded to Paris and studied briefly with Jean Paul Laurens at the Acadèmie Julian and with André Lhote. While abroad, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and studied at the British Academy in Rome.

When Evergood returned to the United States in 1926, he began exhibiting in earnest; he showed at the Dudensing Galleries and the Montross Gallery became his dealer. Few of these early works, often imaginative Biblical themes and fantastic figure studies, survive. Contemporary critics noted the influence of El Greco and Paul Cézanne. (2)

As with the work of many of his contemporaries, Evergood’s style and subject matter were radicalized by the Depression. By the early 1930s, Evergood fully embraced the social themes that would define his career. His work into the mid-1940s was characterized by scenes of laborers, factories, strikes, and street life that appeared in the work he did for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project, as well as his own easel paintings. The approaches to his subjects of this period range from sympathetic to satirical to scathing indictments of social injustices. His American Tragedy (1937, private collection), for instance, depicts a contemporary battle between police and strikers at a Gary, Indiana steel mill. Evergood actively engaged in the political struggles he championed in his art. He was arrested and beaten during the “219 Strike” protesting layoffs from the Federal Art Project, served as President of the Artists Union, and contributed to exhibitions of the John Reed Club, which encouraged artists to engage with urgent social issues.

In keeping with his charged subject matter, Evergood’s work does not celebrate ideal beauty or harmonious forms. Instead, his compositions explore discord and ironies, exaggerated figures and claustrophobic settings. His unorthodox color choices underscore this interest in heightened sensibilities. In an interview with John Bauer, he explained how he selected his palette:

It’s done, with me, by closing my eyes and knowing the color, feeling the color in my brain that I want to use—the nasty color or sickly color, the sweet color or violent color or pretty-pretty-dolly color that will express the mood of what I’m trying to put over. . . it’s not an analytical process. (3)

After years of financial instability, in the 1940s Evergood’s career benefited from a few key associations. John Sloan, a close friend, bought his paintings and promoted his works to museums. And a chance meeting with collector Joseph Hirshhorn in 1943 resulted in the purchase of nine paintings. The proceeds from the sale, as well as a good stock tip from Hirshhorn, gave Evergood an important degree of financial independence.

By the end of the 1940s, Evergood left his Social Realist subject matter. His work of the next decades again considered Biblical themes, as well as self-portraits, figure studies, and city and beach scenes, replacing his earlier damning social commentary with gentler satire. These works are generally rendered in a more linear, open manner than the densely packed earlier compositions.

Evergood exhibited frequently during his long career. In the 1950s and 1960s he showed at venues including the Carnegie Institute and the Corcoran Gallery. He had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1960. His work is held by most major museums in the United States. He died in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1973.

1) Evergood recalled that the name change came about at the suggestion of then-First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Evergood’s father had written to Churchill to ask whether his son’s name had prevented his admittance to the Royal Navy Training College. Churchill reportedly replied in agreement. John I.H. Bauer, Philip Evergood (New York: Praeger with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1960), 19-20.
2) Bauer, 40.
3) Evergood quoted in Bauer, 108.