Sidney Hurwitz - Green Line
American, b.1932
Green Line, 1985
Etching with hand-coloring, 22.25 x 29 inches
Edition 3/20
02.014

Gift of Judy and J.D. Williamson II (BBA '67, MBA '68)

Sidney Hurwitz works in a well-established tradition of American realism. As a painter and printmaker, Hurwitz began drawing attention and winning awards and fellowships in the later 1950s. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Hurwitz has exhibited worldwide, working primarily in woodcut and later intaglio. Hurwitz was also an artist of his time, with aesthetic affiliations in the 1960s to American formalist abstraction and photorealism.

Working in the Boston area and drawn to the industrial culture that marked the region, he chose as subject the structural elements of the factory and the city. Like his celebrated realist predecessor, Charles Sheeler, he cropped his industrial scenes to create unusual close-ups, rendering them in precisionist detail. With this concentration on his subject and without any human activity, he forces the eye to focus on the intricacies and beauty of unexpected shapes. For the past few years, Hurwitz has produced a number of hand-colored aquatints based on imagery from the steel industry and related industrial and urban subjects.

Sidney Hurwitz works in a well-established tradition of American realism. As a painter and printmaker, Hurwitz began drawing attention and winning awards and fellowships in the later 1950s. Working in the Boston area and drawn to the industrial culture that marked the region, he chose as subject the structural elements of the factory and the city. Like his celebrated realist predecessor, Charles Sheeler, he cropped his industrial scenes to create unusual close-ups, rendering them in precisionist detail. With this concentration on his subject and without any human activity, he forces the eye to focus on the intricacies and beauty of unexpected shapes. In this enterprise, Hurwitz was also an artist of his time, with aesthetic affiliations in the 1960s to American formalist abstraction and photorealism.