Samuel L. Margolies
Samuel L. Margolies (1897-1974) was born in New York City. He attended Cooper Union Art School and the National Academy of Design. In the 1930s he was involved with the Queensboro Society of Allied Arts and Crafts. From 1935 until 1939 Margolies participated in the Works Progress Administration easel-painting program as a printmaker. He left the WPA in 1939 to work for the Bundy Corporation as a circuit designer. Margolies taught courses in etching during the 1950s. His work is included in the collections of the Society of American Etchers, the Library of Congress, the Mobile Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and in various federal buildings and embassies in Washington, D.C.. He was a member of the Society of American Etchers of New York City. Margolies, who had been an etcher, painter, teacher, writer, and lecturer, died in 1974.
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Samuel L. Margolies was a master of intaglio printmaking technique who specialized in quiet, unpeopled landscapes and images of New York City's skyscrapers seen from dizzying heights. A native of Brooklyn, New York, Margolies studied in New York at the Cooper Union Art School and the venerable National Academy of Design, and privately with illustrator, painter, and printmaker Victor Semon Perard (1870-1957). He also attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, a New York academy that attracted numerous immigrant and first-generation Americans aspiring to work in construction design trades. He began exhibiting his paintings there around 1927 and soon established a reputation for images of urban architecture and rural scenes in both oils and watercolors.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when many artists made prints in an effort to reach a wider audience through low-priced multiple artworks, Margolies turned seriously to etching. Working in a range of intaglio techniques, he became a master of the tonal medium of aquatint. His lonely images of the countryside and views of Manhattan's vast canyons from the daring viewpoint of high-rise construction workers captured the populist mood of the era. Margolies exhibited in numerous venues, mostly in New York, and reached a broad public through Associated American Artists, a gallery that published and marketed small editions of inexpensive prints, and the Miniature Print Club, which offered small collectibles.
In 1935 Margolies joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a depression-era government relief program, and he served as an instructor in its Art Teaching Division. He was active in a number of artists' organizations, including the Society of American Etchers and the Queensboro Society of Allied Arts and Crafts in his native Brooklyn. His etchings were displayed in the New York World's Fair in 1939. That year, he left the WPA to work as a circuit designer for the Bundy Corporation, but he continued to work as an etcher into the early 1940s. In the 1950s, he conducted classes in etching, although by that date he appears to have ceased making original prints. Margolies is remembered today as one of a host of talented depression-era American artists whose representational prints record the realities of contemporary life.
