Lithograph by Joseph Hirsch, clown reading news, c1925

Joseph Hirsch
(Source: Wiki) Joseph Hirsch (1910-1981) was an American painter, illustrator, muralist and teacher. Painting:22.5 inches 18.5 inches, 17 inches x 13 inches without frame. Social commentary was the backbone of Hirsch's art, especially works depicting civic corruption and racial injustice.

His works are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and many other museums.

In the late 1930s, Hirsch worked in Philadelphia as an artist in the easel painting division of the Works Project Administration. He painted murals for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Office Building at 2113-27 South Street; for the Family Court Building at 1801 Vine Street; and for the Benjamin Franklin High School at Broad & Green Streets (now demolished).
<br<During World War II, his image of a smiling and waving soldier shipping out, Till We Meet Again (1942), was the most popular War Bond poster. In 1942-1943, he was embedded as an artist/war correspondent with naval airmen in Florida, then with the U.S. Navy Medical Corps in the South Pacific. In 1944, he was embedded with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in North Africa and Italy. Some of his most powerful war paintings depict wounded soldiers being removed from the battlefield.

Hirsh often used an intimate scene to suggest the enormous emotion of a subject: The Lynch Family (1946) depicts a young black mother holding a baby, distraught at the murder of her husband.[9] The painting was published as an illustration in the Communist journal The New Masses,[10] following the July 1946 lynching of two black men and their wives in Monroe, Georgia.[11][12] The Burden (1947) depicts an overwhelmed American GI installing white cross gravemarkers in a military cemetery, while in the background a second GI unloads yet another jeep-full.[13] Hirsch's poster for the original 1949 Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman depicts a beaten-down Willy Loman trudging onward with his heavy suitcases.

Hirsch occasionally explored Christian themes. His version of The Crucifixion (1945) is a closeup view from behind, and focuses on the busy workman preparing to nail Jesus's hand to the cross. The Journey (ca.1948), painted as a Christmas card for Hallmark Cards, depicts the Flight into Egypt, and presents Mary and Joseph in modern dress on the back of a donkey—with Joseph holding a trombone![14] Supper (1963–1964) depicts 12 vagrant men seated around a table in what appears to be a soup kitchen. The painting's name and the number of men recall The Last Supper.

Hirsch also worked as a commercial artist and portrait painter. He produced dozens of lithographs, most based on his paintings, and described himself as a "full-time painter and a Sunday lithographer." Among his popular lithographs were Lunch Hour (1942), depicting a black youth asleep at his school desk;[15] Banquet (1945), a closeup of a black man and an old white man sitting side by side at a lunch counter;[16] and a color lithograph of the Boston Tea Party, published at the time of the 1976 Bicentennial. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioned him in the late-1960s to create illustrations documenting construction of the Soldier Creek Dam (completed 1974), in Wasatch County, Utah.

In his mature period, the 1960s and 1970s, Hirsch used a series of layered planes to compose a painting. Typically, these planes were parallel to the picture plane, with depth suggested by receding figures, rather than through lines of perspective. These paintings appear to be snapshots, capturing people in mid-action, not posing.

Hirsch taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1947-1948), the American Art School of New York University (1948-1949), the National Academy of Design (1959–1967), and the Art Students League of New York (1967-1981). He was an artist-in-residence at the University of Utah (Summer 1959, 1975), Utah State University (year), Dartmouth College (Spring 1966),and Brigham Young University (1971)

Good condition overall