Ethel Polacheck Margolies (1907 - 1993)

Three Chimneys, 1956, oil on Masonite, signed and dated lower left, 18 x 36 inches, titled verso, presented in its original frame

$7,500

Three Chimneys  is a prime example of Ethel Margolies’ Precisionist-influenced industrial scenes. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Margolies made a name for herself by painting the Northeast’s factories, foundries, and manufacturing plants. Although this subject matter is often associated with male artists, Margolies is part of an important lineage of female modernists who depicted symbols of America’s industrial might. Starting with artists like New Jersey’s Elsie Driggs and Chicago’s Yvonne Deluc Pryor, Margolies is part of a through line of women Precisionist painters that also included the West Coast’s Vanessa Helder. Whereas these artists tended towards a stark and pristine realism, Margolies seems to have been influenced by the 1920s and early 1930s work of Charles Demuth’s and Charles Sheeler’s highly designed paintings from the same period, as both adopted a cubo-futurist oriented brand of Precisionism.

Ethel Polacheck Margolies was a Connecticut painter, mixed media artist and arts administrator.  She studied at Smith College, Silvermine Guild Artists, and at Umerto Romano’s School in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. She was a member of, and exhibited with, the Silvermine Guild Artists, Connecticut Watercolor Society and New Haven Paint and Clay Club. Margolies' work was exhibited widely and critically praised in the 1950s and 1960s, winning many awards for her Precisionist-influenced industrial compositions. Margolies served as the Director of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Silvermine Guild Artists.