Morris Topchevsky

Mural Study (Construction), ca. 1930s

Watercolor and graphite on paper

7 x 19 1/2 inches (framed 16 3/4 x 29 1/4 inches)

Signed M. Topchevsky on reverse.

#6801

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Morris Topchevsky immigrated to Chicago with his family in 1910, leaving behind persecution in his native Poland. Once in Chicago, Topchevsky found a friend and colleague in Jane Addams. In the early 1920s, Topchevsky studied art at Addams’ Hull House and also enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied with noted Impressionist Albert Krehbiel. Topchevsky traveled to Mexico City in the mid-1920s, when he was moved by the monumental public murals of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Topchevsky met and worked with Rivera during his stay in Mexico City.

Morris Topchevsky exhibited at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago (where his work was shown fourteen times between 1923 and 1946); the National Academy of Design, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Hyde Park; and the White Museum, San Antonio, among others. He completed murals for the Abraham Lincoln Center on Chicago’s South Side and for the Holmes School in Oak Park, IL.