Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Private Collection, West Virginia

For Aaron Bohrod, the city of Chicago, with its industrial vistas, dilapidated houses, and engaging genre scenes, provided an endlessly exciting source of artistic inspiration. Born there in 1907, the son of a grocer, he began formal artistic training in 1927 as a full-time student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly thereafter he accepted a part-time position as a commercial artist for an advertising agency. Working half the day and attending classes the other, he saved enough money for a sojourn in New York, where he enrolled at the progressive Art Students League. Instructed by nationally acclaimed artists like John Sloan and Kenneth Hayes Miller, he adopted the viewpoint that his paintings should record his own personal reactions to the subject at hand.

Upon his return to Chicago in 1932, Bohrod was painting in a style very much informed by the social realist concerns of his mentor Sloan. Working from sketches of real-life observations, he created images that conveyed a sense of the city’s distinctive character, as well as the pervasive desolation of Depression-era America. Fluctuating between a deliberate, exacting style and a loose, brushy one, the artist rendered the scenes of Chicago’s abandoned streets, junk yards, and factories with a sympathetic hand. He applied this approach to other locales as well. An avid traveler, and a foreign correspondent for the army during World War II, Bohrod sought out the aesthetic of the unlovely everywhere he went, discerning greater character in the old, battered and worn than the new and untarnished.

Painted not long after the artist’s return to his hometown, Chicago Burlesque conveys Bohrod’s early interest in the seedy underbelly of metropolitan life. A bawdy form of popular entertainment, burlesque shows incorporated elaborate costumes and dramatic lighting effects to create sensational spectacles that often bordered on erotic tableau. Using highly keyed shades of red, yellow and purple to depict the bright lights and flashy scenery, Bohrod reveals the salacious quality of the shows through the nude forms of the performers who dance seductively across the stage. Appearing white from the glare of the spotlights, their skin contrasts with the dark, cool hues used to delineate the audience members. The artist’s imaginative colors and intentionally rapid, sketchy paint application endow the composition with a dream-like haze. This feeling of fantasy is continued by the equivocal position and demeanor of the standing man in the foreground. Though protruding into the space of the dancers, he seems removed from the activity of the scene. Unclear, however, is whether this distance suggests plain disinterest on the part of the man or a personal flight of the imagination. In the end, the artist’s treatment of the event conveys a convincing sense of the burlesque’s enchantingly surreal power.

Aaron Bohrod’s paintings, watercolors and prints can be found in the permanent collections of many prominent institutions, including The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.