ARTIST: George J Marinko (Connecticut, New York, 1908 - 1989)
NAME: Still Life with Tea Set
YEAR: circa 1933
MEDIUM: oil on board
CONDITION: Minor craquelure. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 10 x 12 inches / 25 x 30 cm
FRAME SIZE: 15 x 17 inches / 38 x 43 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right
PROVENANCE: New Haven Paint and Clay Club, CT (has label on verso)
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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BIOGRAPHY:
George Marinko was one of the founders of the surrealist style in the United States. He was born in Derby, Connecticut in 1908. From 1925 to 1929, Marinko attended the Waterbury Art School, coming under the influence of Lewis York, a visiting art professor from Yale. Funded by wealthy persons in Waterbury, he was able to attend the Yale School of Fine Arts where York and Eugene Savage were teachers, and Marinko began experimenting with surrealism. However, his academic training ended that first year with the stock market collapse. He survived by taking odd jobs and painting traditional landscapes. He was an individualist and worked in the surrealist style before he knew what it was. From 1934-1942, he painted in the surrealist style and completed regionalist landscapes. In 1936 he was included in an exhibition of surrealist art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In the late 1930s he traveled to Europe and Mexico, and on his return, worked for the Public Works of Art Project and then for the WPA Federal Arts Project from 1938 to 1940. In an interesting departure from approved criteria, the Federal Arts Project accepted a couple surrealist paintings from among the seventeen he completed. One of his paintings not done under the WPA, Orpheus in Agony , was exhibited at the New York World's Fair. Marinko taught at the Waterbury Art School and in 1950-1951 served as an assistant director of the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. According to one art dealer, Marinko's earliest surrealist paintings were among the best by an American that he had seen, but Marinko never considered himself an equal with other surrealist artists. He was not well known outside of Waterbury or New Haven, where he spent the last thirty years of his life in a two room apartment. Visitors noted that there was very little furniture in his apartment, and that it contained numerous easels paintings that no one had ever seen. It was not until his later years that art historians and the public began to appreciate Marinko's contributions to the development of American art through his surrealist paintings. He died in 1989.