Chaim Gross

Chaim Gross (/xaɪ(ə)m/; March 17, 1902 – May 5, 1991) was an American sculptor and educator of Hungarian Jewish origin. Gross studied and taught at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City’s Lower Manhattan.

Gross was born to a Jewish family in Máramaros County, Kingdom of Hungary, in the village of Ökörmező (now known as Mizhhiria, Ukraine), in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia (which was annexed into the Ukrainian SSR in 1939 and became part of newly independent Ukraine in 1991). During World War I, Russian forces invaded Austria-Hungary; amidst the turmoil, the Grosses fled Kolomyia. They returned when Austria retook the town in 1915, refugees of the war. When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest to join their older siblings Sarah and Pinkas. Gross applied to and was accepted by the art academy in Budapest and studied under the painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklós Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna, Austria, shortly before immigrating to the United States in 1921.

Gross' brother Naftoli had arrived in New York City in 1914. He sent money to Chaim and his other brother Avrom-Lieb, the two of whom traveled from Vienna to Le Havre, France, from where they took a boat to New York in March 1921.

Gross's studies continued in the United States at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he studied with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League of New York, with Robert Laurent. He also attended the Educational Alliance Art School, studying under Abbo Ostrowsky, at the same time as Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Adolph Gottlieb, and Peter Blume.

In 1926, Gross began teaching at The Educational Alliance, and continued teaching there for the next 50 years. Louise Nevelson was among his students at the Alliance (in 1934), during the time she was transitioning from painting to sculpture. He also taught Bernard Simon starting in 1938.^{[page needed][ISBN missing]}

Gross began exhibiting sculpture in group shows of students at the Educational Alliance, and then at the Jewish Art Center in the Bronx. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he exhibited at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries and, beginning in 1928, at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art).

In 1929, Gross experimented with printmaking, and created an important group of 15 linocuts and lithographs of landscapes, New York City streets and parks, women in interiors, the circus, and vaudeville. The entire suite is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gross returned to the medium of printmaking in the 1960s, and produced approximately 200 works in the medium over the next two decades.

In March 1932, Gross had his first solo exhibition at Gallery 144 in New York City. For a short time they represented Gross, as well as his friends Milton Avery, Moses Soyer, Ahron Ben-Shmuel and others.