Philip Evergood

Philip Evergood (1901–1973) was born in New York City to a father of Polish Jewish descent and a Cornish Irish mother. He attended boarding schools in England and was a student at Eton during the German air raids of 1914–1918. During the 1920s he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and traveled in Europe, returning to America for good in 1931 to study with George Luks of the Ashcan School, an art movement that sought to depict the daily realities of urban life in New York City. Evergood participated in and used his art to document the struggles of workers, minorities, and the poor, and he was an active member of progressive artists’ organizations, such as the Artists Union, while working in federally sponsored artists’ relief programs. He was deeply inspired by the socially engaged art of the Mexican muralists and completed several mural projects of his own. Many of his paintings weave together sensuousness, symbolism, fantasy, humor, satire, and social comment, using garish colors and expressionist distortion of form, with stylistic influences including El Greco, Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Daumier, and Toulouse-Lautrec. He was also a printmaker and a sculptor.