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Charles Turzak
1899–1986
BirthplaceStreator, Illinois, United States of America
Death placeOrlando, Florida, United States of America
BiographyCharles Turzak is best known for his woodcut book illustrations and prints, which range in style from purely abstract designs to highly realistic and detailed images of modern life. Turzak was the son of an immigrant coal miner and grew up in an industrial town one hundred miles southwest of Chicago. As a youth he was accomplished in drawing and wood-carving. After winning an art competition sponsored by the grain processing company Purina Mills of St. Louis, Turzak attended the Art Institute of Chicago. To support his studies, he worked in advertising and taught a class in woodcut and wood engraving at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts. In 1927, he received a commission from Northwestern University to make several prints of its campus. Shortly thereafter, he gained increasing local recognition as a skilled woodcut artist. Following a 1929 trip to Europe to study the works of the old masters, he translated his travel watercolors into colored prints. For the next two decades, he lived and worked in the Chicago area.
In the 1930s, Turzak garnered acclaim for his woodcuts and wood engravings of Chicago city scenes and book illustrations. At a printmaking event at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, he carved, as fair visitors watched, thirty-six wood blocks illustrating the life of Abraham Lincoln for a book on America's great president. This project was followed by another series of eighty woodcuts for a biography of Benjamin Franklin, with text by the artist's wife, Florence, published in 1935. His accomplishments in woodcut brought Turzak widespread recognition. His most popular prints, Grant Park and Man with a Drill, demonstrate his affinity with the abstracting tendencies of modern art; they were admired by printmaker Clare Leighton, who cited them in her 1936 book Wood Engravings of the 1930s.
Turzak also pursued a career in painting for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a government Depression-era relief program, for which he created murals for the Chicago Post Office, in addition to individual prints and an illustrated history of Illinois. As a painter, Turzak worked in oils, acrylic, and gouache (an opaque water-based medium) as well as watercolor. In addition to his woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, Turzak experimented late in his career with so-called paper cut printmaking, in which he printed from a block to which he had adhered cut-out shapes in mat board or other thick papers. In this medium, he made a number of abstract works with broad flat shapes in bright color. Turzak was identified with the Chicago art scene for most of his career, but in 1958, he moved to Orlando, Florida, where he continued to work as an artist until his death at the age of eighty-seven.
In the 1930s, Turzak garnered acclaim for his woodcuts and wood engravings of Chicago city scenes and book illustrations. At a printmaking event at Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1933, he carved, as fair visitors watched, thirty-six wood blocks illustrating the life of Abraham Lincoln for a book on America's great president. This project was followed by another series of eighty woodcuts for a biography of Benjamin Franklin, with text by the artist's wife, Florence, published in 1935. His accomplishments in woodcut brought Turzak widespread recognition. His most popular prints, Grant Park and Man with a Drill, demonstrate his affinity with the abstracting tendencies of modern art; they were admired by printmaker Clare Leighton, who cited them in her 1936 book Wood Engravings of the 1930s.
Turzak also pursued a career in painting for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a government Depression-era relief program, for which he created murals for the Chicago Post Office, in addition to individual prints and an illustrated history of Illinois. As a painter, Turzak worked in oils, acrylic, and gouache (an opaque water-based medium) as well as watercolor. In addition to his woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, Turzak experimented late in his career with so-called paper cut printmaking, in which he printed from a block to which he had adhered cut-out shapes in mat board or other thick papers. In this medium, he made a number of abstract works with broad flat shapes in bright color. Turzak was identified with the Chicago art scene for most of his career, but in 1958, he moved to Orlando, Florida, where he continued to work as an artist until his death at the age of eighty-seven.