Aaron Bohrod
American, 1907 - 1992Houseboats - Chicago River, 1939
Not on view
Oil on Masonite
DimensionsFramed: 35 1/4 × 46 1/8 in. (89.5 × 117.2 cm)
29 × 40 in. (73.7 × 101.6 cm)
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, Inlander Collection, L2003.46
This painting depicts a scene of Depression-era houseboats moored along the Chicago River in Illinois.
Aaron Bohrod was born in Chicago in l907. Between l926 and l930, he studied art, first at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and then at the Art Students League in New York, where he was taught by John Sloan, Kenneth Hays Miller, and several other well-known American painters. Heeding Sloan's admonition that artists should "paint what they know," Bohrod left New York in 1930 and returned to his native Chicago to paint views of the city's north side streets and the life of the working class in the Great Lakes region. Through the 1930s, Bohrod exhibited his work in most of the important exhibitions surveying contemporary trends in American art. During the Second World War, he served as an artist-correspondent for Life magazine. Following the unexpected death of John Steuart Curry in 1946, Bohrod was invited to assume the position of Artist in Residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Resettling in Madison, Bohrod began documenting rural Wisconsin in the same manner that he chronicled urban Chicago in the 1930s.
Through the thirties and forties, Bohrod gained fame as one of America's most original and prolific Regionalists. His images of city life in the industrial Great Lakes have an expressive quality unique in the art of the American Scene. From l954 on, Bohrod focused on trompe-l'oeil paintings and gained further recognition as a still life painter.
