Mitchell Siporin

Mitchell Siporin was born on May 5, 1910, in New York City^[3] to Hyman, a truck driver, and Jennie Siporin, both immigrants from Poland,^[4] and grew up in Chicago.^[2][5] Siporin attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He did illustrations for Esquire and other magazines. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Siporin worked as a painter for the Illinois Art Project through the Works Progress Administration.^[6] Together with Edward Millman, he painted "the largest single mural project awarded for a post office by the Section of Fine Arts" in the Central Post Office in St Louis, Missouri.^[5]

In late 1943 he was deployed as a sergeant in the Army Artist Unit, where he served alongside Rudolph von Ripper. He sent back drawings and watercolours from North Africa and Italy.^[7]

He married Miriam Tane in Manhattan to November 9, 1945.^[8] He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945 and 1947.^[9] In 1949, he won the Prix de Rome in painting.^[5]

In 1951, he founded the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University.^[10] In 1956, he became the first curator of the Brandeis University Art Collection.^[10]

Siporin died in 1976 in Newton, Massachusetts.^[11] He was Jewish.^[12]

Siporin's work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago,^[13] the Detroit Institute of Arts,^[14] the Metropolitan Museum of Art,^[15] the Museum of Modern Art,^[16] the National Gallery of Art,^[17] the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,^[18] the Smithsonian American Art Museum,^[11] the Whitney Museum of American Art,^[19] and Albert G. Lane Technical High School in Chicago.^[20]

In 1947 his painting End of an Era won the Logan Medal of the Arts at the 51st Annual Exhibition in Chicago.^[21]

• Boston Expressionism