MITZI MELNICOFF American, 1922–1972
professional illustrator at N. W. Ayers,
Portrait of Albert Kligman 1971 Woodcut
for Columbia Records and a number of
Woodmere Art Museum: Gift of Drs. Albert M. and Lorraine Kligman, 2011
Art (now the University of the Arts) from
Inc., in Philadelphia, and in the 1950s she worked as a freelance illustrator magazines, including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Cosmopolitan. She was an instructor at the Philadelphia College of 1962 until her untimely death in 1972. Larry Day, who was Melnicoff’s close colleague, organized a memorial exhibition in her honor at Philadelphia
Mitzi Melnicoff depicts her husband,
College of Art in 1972. Day described
Dr. Albert Kligman, a renowned
Melnicoff as:
dermatologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of
. . . a painter of celebration. Her
Medicine. The portrait is a woodblock
paintings echo over and over again her
print with five colors; Melnicoff carved a
sense of richness, of joy, of love. . . she
separate woodblock to print each color.
continually strove to find greater and
The bold lines and dramatic sense of
more expressive rhythms, fuller and more
light, with Kligman’s face half in red and
telling relationships, and bolder and
half in yellow, convey a powerful force of
deeper structures.
character. Dr. Loraine Kligman, a research professor Born in Philadelphia, Mitzi Melnicoff
of dermatology at the University of
attended classes at the Graphic Sketch
Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine,
Club (now the Fleisher Art Memorial),
married Albert Kligman in the 1970s;
Settlement Music School, and then
she gave this portrait by Melnicoff, her
Temple University’s Tyler School of Art
husband’s previous wife, to Woodmere in
from 1939 to 1943. She worked as a
2011.
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