Sam Himmelfarb (July 4, 1904 – December 17, 1976) was a Russian Empire-born, American artist and commercial exhibit designer, known for his modernist-influenced paintings of everyday people and urban scenes. He also designed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio (built, 1942) in Winfield, Illinois, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Himmelfarb studied art at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design in New York and at the Wisconsin School of Fine and Applied Arts. He initially painted in a realist style influenced by the Ashcan School, which gave way to more modernist, increasingly abstract styles. His paintings appeared in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), Terra Museum of American Art, Milwaukee Art Institute, and Arts Club of Chicago, and in circulating shows from the American Federation of Arts, among other venues. He received awards from the AIC, Wisconsin State Fair and Milwaukee Art Museum, and his work belongs to the collection of the latter, and those of the Illinois State Museum, Block Museum, and Arkansas Art Center, among others. Himmelfarb was married to the artist and educator, Eleanor Himmelfarb (1910-2009); their son, John Himmelfarb (b. 1946), and grandchild, Serena Aurora Day Himmelfarb (b. 1986), are also artists.
Life
Samuel Himmelfarb was born in Latvia to Jewish parents in 1904. In 1905, they immigrated to the United States, but soon after, Himmelfarb's mother died during childbirth in New York City. He and his father, Chaim, moved on to Wisconsin, settling in Racine and then Milwaukee. Himmelfarb took weekend art classes at the Layton School of Art and attended an art summer camp, meeting lifelong friend and future WPA muralist, Schomer Lichtner. In high school, he learned to play the drums and by the early 1920s was performing semi-professionally in local vaudeville acts, dance music ensembles, and on a Pacific cruise ship; large crowds and musicians would later serve as subjects for many of his paintings.
After high school, Himmelfarb studied art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1924)—forging relationships with artists such as Ben Shahn—and at the Wisconsin School of Fine and Applied Arts, working under German-born landscape artist Gustave Moeller. In 1926, he hitchhiked to New York to study at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, where he took classes, respectively, with artists Charles Webster Hawthorne and Boardman Robinson, and was influenced by the older Ashcan School artists. He supported himself with two jobs, as a drummer—playing a 16-show run for big band leader Horace Heidt and gigs with Jimmy Durante—and an architect's apprentice on projects for Long Island homes and the Empire State Building. He also met and married Irene Donnelly in 1926, and they had a daughter, Nell, in 1933. They moved to the Midwest in the 1930s, and Himmelfarb focused on commercial three-dimensional design work, creating window displays for Mandel Brothers department store and exhibits for the 1933 A Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. In 1937, he founded his own industrial exhibit company, Three Dimensions, which would support a fine art career that he pursued painting three days each week; exhibit clients included Union Pacific Railroad, Parker Brothers, General Motors, and Motorola, among others. By this time, Himmelfarb's marriage had become strained and that same year he and Irene divorced.
Himmelfarb was part of a socially conscious group of Midwest modernists that included Mitchell Siporin, Julio de Diego, Macena Barton, and Milwaukee-based Joseph Friebert, among others. He was active in antifascist groups and in the Arts Club of Chicago and Artists Equity (serving as president in the 1950s); he often delivered lectures to civic groups, such as “Don’t Look Now, But Your Modern Art is Showing.” At a Hyde Park activist meeting in the late 1930s, Himmelfarb met Eleanor Gorecki. Their relationship became serious, and he and Gorecki married in 1939, remaining so until Sam's death in 1976. In 1940, they purchased an undeveloped property in a not-yet residential section of rural Winfield, Illinois, planning to settle there and raise a family closer to nature. By late 1942, they built and moved into a self-designed, Usonian-style house there, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the following years, they had two children, Susan (b. 1943) and John (b. 1946).