Emil Armin was an American artist known for his use of vibrant color and brushwork. From the 1920s through his death in 1971, Armin maintained a high profile in Chicago's artistic community. Art critic Samuel Putnam, of the Chicago Evening Post, described Armin as "perhaps the most finely sensitized artist in Chicago…with a soul of a peasant and poet and the mind of a philosopher."
Early life and education
Armin was born in Rădăuți, Austria-Hungary in 1883. His grandfather was a Jewish scribe, copying sacred scrolls for the local temple. Armin began drawing at the age of five and presumably learned woodcarving from his father, Hirsch Lieb, who was an amateur artist. When Armin was 10, his parents died, leaving him an orphan. He was raised by older siblings until he got a full-time job at a restaurant at age 14 and moved into the home of the owner. After a restaurant patron encourage him to attend art school, he moved to Chernivtsi in 1901 at age 18 to study art. In 1905, Armin emigrated to the United States, to join his brother Sigmund and his sister Frieda in Chicago, where he continued to draw sketches whenever he could while unhappily working in a wealthy cousin's store. Armin began his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1908, and he continued working and studying whenever possible, even through periods of great economic struggle. In 1916, having saved four hundred dollars from his many jobs, he transitioned from taking only night classes to taking day classes as a full-time student, pausing only once during World War I to take a job making artillery harnesses at eighteen dollars a week. He studied under, and was inspired by, George Bellows, Randall Davey and Herman Sachs. Other instructors included Albert Henry Krehbiel, Antonin Sterba, and Harry L. Timmins. In the Spring of 1920, at age 36 and twelve years after he first enrolled in a night class, Armin graduated.
Early work
Career
Armin's artwork included paintings, woodcuts, woodcarvings, sculptures, cartoons and etchings, but he is best known for his paintings. He was a modernist painter, with a fondness for painting landscapes, primitive peoples, flowers and animals. In his work, Armin synthesized contemporary artistic trends with inspiration drawn from his Jewish roots and from the peasant traditions of the American Southwest and his native Eastern Europe. Most of his work was completed in Chicago. After finishing his studies, Armin joined a group of artists, including Gertrude Abercrombie, Francis Strain and Charles Biesel, at the 57th Street Art Colony in Hyde Park, near Stony island Avenue, where he lived and worked until 1925. Armin then shared an art studio with fellow modernist Todros Geller at 59 East Adams from 1926 to 1930. He then briefly moved to the North Side of Chicago, where he worked and lived at 927 Sunnyside Avenue before permanently relocating back to the South Side on Harper Avenue in Hyde Park. His Chicago exhibits in the 1920s included the No-jury Society, Cor Ardens, Neo-Arlimusc, and the Chicago Society of Artists. In the 1930s he entered the Grant Park Art Fair, and he worked as an easel painter for the Works Progress Administration. In 1940, Armin secured a job working for the Illinois Art Project. In this post Armin visited other artists working for the Project offering advice and criticism. It was also in 1940 that Armin, along with other local Jewish artists, formed the American Jewish Art Club and continued to exhibit with them until his death. Expanding his horizons beyond Chicago, Armin also traveled to work, briefly relocating to Dayton and making trips to the Indiana Dunes, the Wisconsin Dells, New Mexico, Maine and later in life to Lake Chapala in Mexico. Over time, Armin was able to make a modest living as an artist, selling his art and making ends meet with occasional jobs teaching art, including working with the Jewish Board of Education and teaching at Hull House. Armin exhibited regionally and nationally until he died at age 88.
Works Progress Administration (WPA) artwork
Approach to art
Armin believed that "the way an artist finds it necessary to live in modern times will automatically assert itself in his work, if he is a true and independent artist."
Critical response
Armin made an impression with the local Chicago art critics. J. Z. Jacobson, an art critic for The Chicagoan, covered Armin's work and eventually wrote a full book on Armin called Thirty-Five Saints and Emil Armin, in which he described Armin as "Playful as a child. Solemn as a prophet. Funny as a clown. Poor as St. Francis of Assisi and almost as happy. Taking the slings and arrows of outrageous fate with stoic calm."
Role in Chicago Modernism
Following his graduation in 1920, Armin became an active member in Chicago's emerging modernist art community, which emphasized freedom of individual expression as its sole doctrine. In 1913, Armin had visited the controversial Armory Show when it was exhibited at the Art Institute, and he fell under the sway of European and American modernism. Inspired by the modernist movement, Armin and other Chicago artists formed their own open and free groups—including The Introspectives, the Cor Ardens, Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, and Neo-Arlimusc—to provide an alternative to the conservative Art Institute of Chicago. Active in all of these groups, Armin exhibited in every one of the No-Jury Society's shows beginning with the second, and eventually served as president of the Society. He also exhibited with the Chicago Society of Artists, which had taken a contentious turn to modernism in 1923.
Marriage and family
In 1945, at the age of 65, Armin married Hilda Rose Diamond, a social worker for the Jewish Family and Community Service in Chicago.
