Sam Glankoff Art for Sale at Auction

SAM GLANKOFF (Glanckopf) was born October 30, 1894 in New York City and showed artistic aptitude and aspirations at an early age. He received little, if any formal training, and in his early years he "lived" inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There he would commit to memory and paint the works he had seen. This solitary apprenticeship to art was to resonate in his work for the rest of his life. In 1917 at the age of 22, Glankoff went to Cuba as a Conscientious Objector to WW I. The few years in Cuba were the only time during his life in which Glankoff actually sold paintings- as an itinerant painter, on horseback, as a means of earning food and shelter.

Two years after his return to New York, in 1922, Glankoff was persuaded to meet Juliana Force, Director of the Whitney Studio Club and from 1922 until 1928, when the Club disbanded. Glankoff was invited to exhibit both paintings and woodcuts in these important large group shows. Glankoff was repeatedly singled out as the "unknown name" receiving praise in New York Times .

Glankoff worked as head artist for numerous art service studios in the 1920s and 30s, and used his rough and expressive style to illustrate books for publishers such as Horace Liveright, Knopf and Harcourt Brace and literary magazines such as St. Nicholas, Scribners and the New Yorker.
Into the 1940s, Glankoff alternated his personal art with a prolific career as a commercial illustrator and comic strip artist. Glankoff was head artist for True Comics a comic book and nationally syndicated comic strip series featuring historical legends, literary classics and science fiction and he also illustrated a great number of comic-strip-style advertising campaigns for companies like Westinghouse, Billy Brand, Chiquita Banana and Popsicle Pete. During this time, Glankoff continued to paint and hone his skill in woodcuts. As his interest in abstraction developed he became fascinated with water-based pigments. He continued to use these methods and media for the remainder of his artistic life.

In the mid-1950s, Glankoff began designing stuffed animals for Impulse Items, his wife's fledgling toy company. From the 1950s until 1970,
Glankoff designed and fabricated over 200 stuffed animal designs, including the original three-dimensional versions of Babar the Elephant and Dr. Suess' Cat in the Hat. He did little personal artwork during this time.

After his wife's death in 1970, Glankoff abandoned the business and devoted himself entirely to his personal art. He returned to the iconography he had been developing throughout the 1950s, began to join panels of uniform sized handmade Japanese paper together in order to make large works and devised his highly innovative method of transfer painting which captured the spontaneity and gestural qualities of his brushstrokes. Glankoff used this method to create large, multi-colored, multi-layered unique works with luminous, atmospheric and textured surfaces. His highly personal system of signs and symbols, his layered backgrounds of resonating color accomplished by this unique method of transfer painting, all give Glankoff a unique place in the history of contemporary art.

After a lifetime of shunning public attention, in 1981, Glankoff agreed to have his first one-man show at the Graham Gallery in New York at the age of 87 -- only a few months before his death in 1982. Today Glankoff’s work is in numerous private and permanent museum collections such as The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Guggenheim Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


(Derived from the Catalogue Notes for GLANKOFF, Sam Glankoff (1894-1982 A Retrospective Exhibition.
"Introduction" by Sam Hunter; Essay: "His Life and Art" by Marilyn Kushner; September 16 - November 27, 1984,
Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.)