Early Years

Arthur Szyk was born to Jewish parents, Solomon and Eugenia Szyk in Łódź, Poland, part of the Russian Empire at that time. He had his first public art exhibition at age 15, and had formal art training in Paris and Krakow. He visited Palestine in 1914 with a group of Polish-Jewish artists and studied Muslim art.
Then he was drafted into the Russian Army and served in World War I. Between 1919 and 1920 during Poland’s war against the Soviet Bolsheviks, Szyk served as a cavalry officer and artistic director of the Department of Propaganda for the Polish Army in Łódź. During that time, Szyk produced small paintings based on themes from Jewish history and Slavic folk tales.

International Recognition

In 1921, Szyk moved to Paris, with his wife Julia and their son George. By then, he was well known for his illuminations and book illustrations, in a style reminiscent of Persian miniatures. He worked on several significant projects in France, including illustrating the Statute of Kalisz, the Haggadah, and a series of watercolors on the American Revolutionary War. The themes of his most admired works, democracy and Judaism, earned him both fame and significant commissions.

Szyk resided in England from 1937-1940 to supervise the publication of the Haggadah, a Jewish religious text that is read every Passover to celebrate the Exodus from Egypt and the triumph of the Jewish people over its enemies.

Arthur Szyk’s Artistic Crusade to the New World

Szyk and his family left England for Canada in 1940. Here, he created artwork that called public attention to the Nazi threat and paid tribute to the plucky British and Canadian servicemen who were fighting to defend democracy.

After spending some six months in Canada, Szyk departed for the United States. He worked at a feverish pace, and his anti-Axis images graced the covers and inside pages of leading magazines, like Time, Colliers, Esquire, Look, The American Mercury, Coronet, and Liberty. His cartoons appeared regularly in The New York Post, The Chicago Sun, and PM. Millions of Americans saw his work, even if they could not pronounce his name.

The country was hotly divided on the issue of involvement in World War II. While most of the population was ardently anti-Nazi, Gallup polls from summer 1940 indicated that 80% of those surveyed opposed an American declaration of war against the Axis powers. In fall 1941, Szyk took aim at the leading isolationist figures in the America First Movement, Charles Lindbergh and Senator Gerald Nye. The artist played up Lindbergh’s prior associations with German leaders, like Göring, and portrayed him as a would-be Stormtrooper, just waiting to be appointed Gauleiter of a Nazi America.

Szyk’s warnings about the threat of Nazism to the United States gained greater public exposure following Putnam’s publication of a collection of his provocative anti-Nazi cartoons and satires in The New Order in summer 1941.

Action – Not Pity

Szyk was a leading anti-Fascist political caricaturist as well as an advocate for Jewish rescue. He devoted a great deal of time and energy to the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and pushed for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Szyk dedicated Tears of Rage to “those of my people who fight for the right to die with their boots on–my pride, my love, my devotion.”

Szyk used his 1942 drawings of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms to reach a larger, non-Jewish audience and drum up financial support for the Emergency Committee to Save the Jews of Europe. In recycling these images – Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear – Szyk intentionally linked Jewish rescue to the foundations of American democracy. Helping to save Jewish lives from destruction at Nazi hands was portrayed as a truly American goal. In 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly lauded his efforts.

Szyk received his US citizenship in 1948. In 1951, he was investigated by the United States House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist. His son, speaking on his behalf, declared his non-affiliation with any Communist organization. Later that year, on September 13, Szyk suffered a heart attack and died at age 57.