David Aronson: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture

$90.00

Essay by Asher Biemann

David Aronson was born in 1923 in Shilova, Lithuania and lived and worked in the Boston area for nearly his entire life. He was educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and began teaching at Boston University in 1955, where he formed the Fine Art Department. Aronson daringly joined religious symbolism with figurative Expressionism, capturing universal human emotions through his striking representations of Biblical allegories. The rich and profound statements in Aronson's work cannot easily be categorized. As an immigrant artist of Jewish background, Aronson has borrowed from Christological, Jewish, mystical, and modernist motifs, placing himself in a humanistic tradition – but also, at times, in a controversial position. Aronson's work cannot be narrowly defined as 'Jewish Art,' nor even as religious art in a traditional sense. Rather, it is a multifaceted, complex, and highly evocative body of work whose themes are equally personal and universal. This major monograph on David Aronson’s work from 1946-2002 is a unique and sweeping retrospective. It reproduces and discusses his works done in encaustic, pastel, charcoal, mixed media, and bronze on a wide range of religious and personal subject matter. It also contains a lecture David Aronson delivered in 1967 at Boston University, "Real and Unreal: The Double Nature of Art." The interpretive essay by Dr. Asher Biemann of the University of Virginia places Aronson's work and biography in an historical, cultural, and intellectual context and comments on specific motifs in his work.