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PHILIP EVERGOOD
(American, 1901-1973)
Self-Portrait, 1960
Oil on canvas mounted on Masonite
15 1/4 x 11 3/8”
Given in memory of Robert B. Mayer by his wife and children 1976.23.1

Philip Evergood was born in New York and educated abroad. He studied art not only at the Slade Art School of London, but also in Paris with André Lhote and others. He also spent a number of months in Spain after 1930, during which time he was impressed by the works of El Greco and Francisco de Goya. Evergood returned to the United States during the depths of the Depression and worked on a number of paintings for the Federal Art Project and the Works Progress Administration. He maintained a socially conscious attitude in his art for the remainder of his career, and was in fact considered to be something of a maverick. He was a figurative painter when much of the art world placed greater value on abstraction, and he was a moralist when moralizing was not considered an option for serious painters. His best-known works are gritty, populist images of contemporary life, and are full of vitality and imagination. A blend of reality and fantasy gives his paintings an appealing, cartoonish quality, and his incisiveness as a social critic emboldens his work. His art is founded on contradiction: sophisticated intent is matched by intentionally crude technique, and tawdry overstatement is balanced with delicate lines. Evergood delighted in defining the artist’s role in unexpected ways, and in Self-Portrait, he depicts himself as a rugged farmhand—bare-chested and bare-footed—working in a wheat field. This work may suggest that art is neither elitist nor intellectual but is rather handmade, hard won, and for the working class.