Harry Brodsky

Painter, printmaker, designer, and teacher Harry Brodsky is best known for lithograph images of Philadelphia and the surrounding area made in the 1930s and 1940s. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Brodsky graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art and also attended the University of Pennsylvania. In the late 1920s, he painted decorative works in the interiors of movie theaters in Haddon Township, New Jersey, and Ambler, Pennsylvania. In 1934, Brodsky's work was included in the exhibition "Paintings and Prints by Philadelphia Artists" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and in the following two decades he participated in numerous other shows in national and international venues. His work won a purchase prize at the Brooklyn Museum in 1947, and the following year garnered another prize at Philadelphia's Print Club, of which he was an active member. During the 1940s and 1950s Brodsky taught at vocational schools in Philadelphia. He later worked as a commercial artist for the Campbell's Soup Company, for the weekly entertainment magazine TV Guide, and for Philadelphia advertising agencies.

Brodsky made both color and monochrome lithographs of a variety of themes and in a wide range of styles reflecting current trends in American art in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Still lifes, landscapes, city scenes, and interiors showing ordinary Philadelphians comprise his subjects; he also created purely nonobjective compositions. During the Great Depression, Brodsky emphasized themes of social justice in portrayals of workers and the down-and-out. In the 1940s his work more frequently emphasized formal qualities as he experimented with abstraction. He also began making prints in various relief media and screenprint techniques. Thirty-three prints by Brodsky are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.