José Gurvich

     José Gurvich (né Zusmanas Gurvicius) was an Uruguayan artist and musician who played an important role in the Constructivism movement of the mid 1900s. Born in Lithuania to Jewish parents, Gurvich and his family moved to Uruguay in the early 1930s to escape economic hardship. His father settled in Montevideo in 1931, and was joined a year later by the rest of his family. Gurvich's father, Jacobo, worked as a barber while José enrolled in elementary school, where he quickly developed a love for drawing and art.

     After graduating in the early 1940s, Gurvich began working in a raincoat factory to help support his family. In 1942, he enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts in Montevideo, where he would study with José Cuneo. In 1943, Gurvich began studying violin with Russian professor David Julber, who also taught Horacio Torres, the youngest son of Joaquín Torres-García. Gurvich met the revered artist through Horacio and, in 1944, was invited to join the Taller Torres-García (TTG). Gurvich remained an active member of the Taller—teaching there and even serving as its Director—until its closure in the 1960s.

     In 1954, Gurvich traveled to Europe for the first time.  He stayed in Madrid for three months, where he studied the work of artists including Velázquez, Goya, Bosch, and Bruegel. He continued on to visit Naples and create ceramic sculpture in Rome, after which he traveled to Israel. There, lived and worked in the Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, where his sister Myriam lived, and his experiences there inspired many works of art. In 1957 Gurvich returned to Montevideo, and began living and working in  the neighborhood of El Cerro. He married Julia Helena Añora in 1960, and the two had a son, Martin in 1963. The following year, Gurvich returned to Israel with his wife and son to stay again in the Kibbutz Ramot Menashe, creating art while working as a shepherd. He returned to Uruguay in 1965 to teach art and continue his own practice in El Cerro before making his final move, in 1970, to New York City. He died there on June 24th, 1974, at the young age of 47.

     During the period of time following Gurvich's family's move to a newly built home in El Cerro, Gurvich traveled frequently. These travels began with Gurvich’s second trip to the Kibbutz Ramot Menashé. This time, he brought his son in order to show him to his community in Israel. During their journey to Israel, the Gurvich family traveled throughout Europe, including stops at Le Havre, Paris, and Marseille. “Once at the kibbutz, Gurvich resumed his work as a shepherd and, in the afternoons, continued his plastic work in the same way that had occurred during his first stay in Israel.”

     Gurvich's work was heavily influenced by Marc Chagall. In an article for ArtNexus, Alicia Haber, author of "José Gurvich - A Song to Life" explains these artictic infuences in connection to Gurvich's works from the 1960s and 1970s. She focuses on the idea of fantastical movemnt and theme of diaspora. She writes, "The floating figures demonstrate Gurvich's ability to work pictorially from fantasy, challenging, for example, the laws of gravity, which is an iconographic element that ties his work to that of Marc Chagall. The mobility and rupture with respect to traditional temporal and spatial coordinates may be linked, as in the case of Chagall, to the artist's Diasporic experiences, moves, displacements, and uprootings. Flying may be linked to the traditional nomadic condition of the Jew, experienced by Gurvich himself on numerous occasions."

Haber, Alicia. Artnexus, 2019, www.artnexus.com/en/magazines/article-magazine-artnexus/641f5b49677110b65a099afc/35/jose-gurvich-a-song-to-life.

     In September 1970, Gurvich immigrated to New York, where he worked and lived for the remainder of his life. Upon arriving in America, Gurvich lived with Lithuanian family members on Long Island. He then moved to an apartment in lower Manhattan. The following year, he joined a group of Latin American artists, many of whom had been a part of the TTG. The same year, he participated in the group exhibitions such as “Select Works from Latin America” at the Greenwich Library in New York and at the Couturier Gallery in Stanford, Connecticut.

     In early 1972, he participated in more group exhibitions, including “Feria de la Opinión Latinoamericana,” at the San Clemente Church in New York, as well as an exhibition organized at the Iramar Gallery of Columbia University in the City of New York. In June, he held an exhibition at the Lerner-Misrachi Gallery in New York, gaining favorable reception from the public and press. In addition to exhibitions in the Northeast, Gurcvich continued to show work in Latin America. He sent a collection of oil and tempera paintings to Medellín, Colombia for the Third Coltejer Biennial.

     In 1973, Gurvich met with Avram Kampf, the advisor to the director of the Jewish Museum in New York. At that time, Kampf was in charge of the exhibition project entitled “The Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art.” Gurvich was later selected to be part of the exhibition with two of his oil paintings: Purim – the Hebrew carnival and Javer Javera – companion of the kibbutz, both of which he had recently produced. The exhibition at the Jewish Museum ran from October 26, 1975 through January 25, 1976, over a year after Gurvich's death. By that time, the institution had also planned an individual retrospective exhibition of Gurvich's work, to be held in 1975, which never occurred.

In 1974, before his death, Gurvich participated in multiple exhibitions in New York. In February, he participated in the exhibition “Sculpture by Painters” at the Humanist Center and in April, he exhibited in the “Masters of Today and Tomorrow” exhibition at Temple Israel, in Great Neck. Unfortunately, on June 24th, 1974, at the age of 47, Gurvich suffered a sudden and fatal coronary occlusion. At the time, he was working on a series of paintings representing the Jewish harvest, sukkot, as well as works that demonstrated his new artistic developments.

     Although, in 1952, Gurvich had written that the testimony of his life remained in his works, his wife expressed his fear of death. “He feared death and his desire was to leave his fingerprints strong enough to defy death, oblivion, nothingness. A work that testified to his love for life, for family, for friendship, for his supreme goal: art.”