Horace Brodsky

Brodsky was born in Melbourne, Australia and studied there before travelling to San Francisco and New York.

He settled in London at the age of 23 and attended the City and Guilds Art School at Kennington.

 

He became one of the original members of the London Group and exhibited regularly with them from 1914. This group of young artists had no particular artistic agenda except a dissatisfaction with the conservatism of the Academy and the New England Art Club.

 

However, Brodsky was also associated with the Vorticist movement with Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. This group was committed to the move towards abstraction and engaged in bitter disputes with more traditional groups of artists. In effect, they were engaged in preparing the way for abstraction and in trying to “blast an insular, backward looking nation out of its slumbering complacency” (Richard Cork, 1974)

These “rebels” also engaged in bitter arguments among themselves and the group effectively disintegrated after the second world war.

 He became friends with the sculptor Gaudier- Brzeska and later, in 1933, wrote his biography.

Whilst living in New York, between1915 and 1923 he became a friend of the artist Jules Pascin and wrote a monograph on his work.

 

Brodsky’s work is held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Australian National Gallery and many more public and private collections.

 

Brodsky was a highly talented draughtsman and skilled printmaker. His images of the human figure are especially memorable and his linocuts are vivid, dramatic and forceful. The image may be simplified but it still remains subtle and expressive. Brodsky was able, through his relief prints, to capture the essentials of his subject matter.