Eleanor Gorecki Himmelfarb (August 16, 1910 – June 16, 2009) was an American artist, teacher and conservationist known for semi-abstract paintings that reference the landscape and human figure, and for her work protecting woodlands in DuPage County, Illinois.Barilleaux, Rene Paul. "Samuel Himmelfarb, Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb: Three Painters." Exhibition catalog. Quincy, IL: Quincy Art Center. 1994.Ho, Sally S. "Eleanor Gorecki Himmelfarb, 1910-2009: Painter loved nature," Chicago Tribune, July 14, 2009. Retrieved February 4, 2018.Lobbes, Dan. "Easements Everywhere." The Heron, Naperville, IL: The Conservation Foundation, Spring/Summer, 2015, p. 6. Retrieved February 4, 2018. She studied art history and design at the University of Chicago, natural history at the Morton Arboretum, and fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago.Quincy Art Center. Three Painters: Samuel Himmelfarb, Eleanor Himmelfarb, John Himmelfarb, Quincy, IL: Quincy Art Center, 1994. Critics characterize Himmelfarb as a modernist, who explored her subjects metaphorically through complex rhythmic compositions, stylized forms, and subtle coloration.Brunetti, John. "Personalizing Modernism: The Paintings of Eleanor Himmelfarb," "Eleanor Himmelfarb: A Fifteen-Year Retrospective, Evanston, IL: Evanston Art Center, 2000.Stodder, Carole. The New Moderns: In Search of Form, Catalogue, Michigan City, IN: Lubeznik Center for the Arts., 2010.Schroeder, R. "The Himmelfarb Family, Two Illinois Center," New Art Examiner, October 1975. Her work was featured in solo shows at the Evanston Art Center (retrospective), University Club of Chicago and Sioux City Art Center, and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. Eighty-First Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago. 1985. Retrieved February 5, 2018. Chicago Cultural Center, and Renaissance Society.Lubeznik Center for the Arts. The New Moderns: In Search of Form, Catalogue, Michigan City, IN: Lubeznik Center for the Arts., 2010. Retrieved February 4, 2018. Himmelfarb taught painting and design for four decades at several institutions, including over 30 years at the DuPage Art League.Brotman Barbara. "Teaching Originality Is an Art," Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1999. Retrieved February 4, 2018.Robert T. Wright Gallery. "Eleanor Himmelfarb: Gates, Letters & Fans," Exhibition materials, Grayslake, IL: Robert T. Wright Gallery, College of Lake County, 2003. Retrieved February 4, 2018. She was married to the painter, Sam Himmelfarb, and helped him design their house, the Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio (built, 1942) in Winfield, Illinois, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb Home and Studio. "Himmelfarb, Samuel House and Studio," National Register of Historic Places Registration. Retrieved February 4, 2018.National Park Services. "National Register of Historic Places announcements," October 11, 2018. Retrieved January 30, 2018.Galpin, Amy, and Susan Weininger. "Samuel Himmelfarb," In Kennedy, Elizabeth and Wendy Greenhouse, Daniel Schulman, Susan Weininger. Chicago Modern, 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New, Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004, p. 121. Their son, John Himmelfarb, and grandchild, Serena Aurora, are also artists.Bonesteel, Michael, and Kramer, Linda K. The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004. Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005.Farber, Janet L. "Truck Route: the Recent Odyssey of Artist John Himmelfarb, In Trucks: Recent Works by John Himmelfarb, New York: The Artists Book Foundation, p. 26–64, 2014 Himmelfarb died at age 98 in Winfield in 2009.
Life Himmelfarb was born Eleanor Gorecki in St. Charles, Illinois in 1910 to a Polish-born father, John, and a German-American mother, Elsie Borman. She spent most of her childhood on area farms before attending St. Charles High School, where she was influenced by an arts-oriented curriculum and the principal, H. Clark Brown, who encouraged her to attend the University of Chicago in 1926. She studied art history and design for two years there, boarding with a family on Chicago's South Side, but was forced to take a year off to teach elementary school due to financial hardship caused by the Great Depression. She returned to complete her degree in 1930, supporting herself with an interior decorating job. During the next decade, she worked for RR Donnelley as a proofreader, traveled to Mexico with women friends (where she met lifelong friend and muralist, Alfredo Zalce), and took up progressive politics. She met her future husband, Sam Himmelfarb, at a Hyde Park activist meeting in the late 1930s.
She and Himmelfarb married in 1939, remaining so until Sam's death in 1976. In 1940, they purchased an undeveloped property in rural Winfield, Illinois, intending to settle and raise a family there. In late 1942, they built and moved into a modernist, Usonian-influenced house designed by Sam, where Eleanor would live for the rest of her life.Scanlan, Patricia Smith. "Samuel Himmelfarb," Modernism in the New City: Chicago Artists, 1920–1950. Retrieved February 4, 2018. The home's large art studio and floor-to-ceiling views of the DuPage River and surrounding woodlands would serve as longtime inspirations for Eleanor's artistic pursuits.College of DuPage. "Eleanor Himmelfarb: Paintings," Exhibition materials, Glen Ellyn, IL: College of DuPage, 1981.Bonesteel, Michael. "Tracking the Backtracker: John Himmelfarb in the Garden," Meetings in the Garden. The Art of John Himmelfarb, Exhibition catalog, Kalamazoo, MI: Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, 1989. In the 1940s, she explored photography as well as mosaic tiles, block prints, stained glass and weaving; she and Sam also had two children, Susan (b. 1943) and John (b. 1946).Kramer, Linda K. "John Himmelfarb: A Life in Art," In The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004, by Michael Bonesteel and Linda K. Kramer, Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. Himmelfarb began studying at the Morton Arboretum with naturalist May Watts during that time; Watts would insist that Himmelfarb take over instruction of the Arboretum's painting classes in the 1950s, initiating a long teaching career.
Art career
Himmelfarb turned to painting with increasing focus in the mid-1950s; she took up conservation in the next decade. In the 1970s, she shared a studio with Sam in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood and they became more involved in the city's art scene.Auer, James. "This Family Celebrates Life," Milwaukee Journal, 1974.Bonesteel, Michael. "Building on Literature, Music, and Modernism: The Prints of John Himmelfarb," In The Prints of John Himmelfarb: A Catalogue Raisonne, 1967- 2004, by Michael Bonesteel and Linda K. Kramer, Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2005. After Sam died in 1976, she enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago—studying with painter Morris Barazani—and took courses at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) with sculptor Abbott Pattison and painter Claude Bentley.
Over the next three decades, Himmelfarb showed widely in Chicago and the Midwest, including solo exhibitions at the University Club of Chicago, Cliff Dwellers Club, Sioux City Art Center, Jan Cicero Gallery (Chicago), South Shore Arts (indiana), and Gallery 72 (Omaha), among others; she was also selected for the AIC's 1985 "Chicago and Vicinity" show and "The Chicago Show" (1990) sponsored by the AIC and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.Evanston Art Center. "Eleanor Himmelfarb: A Fifteen-Year Retrospective, Evanston, IL: Evanston Art Center, 2000.Bates, Geoffrey. "A Circulating Library," John Himmelfarb, Selected Recent Works, Kenosha, WI: Carthage College, H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art, 2009. Himmelfarb exhibited with Sam and son, John, at the Bradley Gallery (Milwaukee, 1974), Chicago's One Illinois Center (1975),Haydon, Harold. "His Images Reflect Our Hectic World," Chicago Sun Times, April 11, 1976. the Quincy Art Center (1994), and the Evanston Art Center (1990), which held a retrospective of her work in 2000.Evanston Art Center. Two Generations Chicago: The Influence of Family, Evanston, IL: Evanston Art Center, 1990. In 2010, she was included posthumously in the show, "The New Moderns: In Search of Form," at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts and a show at the Elmhurst Art Museum.Artslant. "The Search for Form: Eleanor Himmelfarb and Holly Renald Cohn," Artslant, 2010. Retrieved February 22, 2019. Her work belongs to many private and public collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Illinois State University, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, and Neiman Marcus Corporate Collection.Himmelfarb, Eleanor. Eleanor Himmelfarb, Exhibition materials, Skokie, IL: Northbranch Gallery, 2007.Illinois State University. Eleanor Himmelfarb , Normal Editions Workshop, 1993. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
Artwork and reception Himmelfarb's painting ranges along a continuum between stylized representation and abstraction that is nonetheless rooted in objective sources, such as the landscape, human figure, and architectural forms.Artner, Alan G. "Eleanor Himmelfarb, Karen Kunc, Al Pounders, Fern Valfer," Review, Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1986. Critics position her work in the modernist tradition of Picasso, Miró, Matisse and Hans Hofmann in terms of its commitment to formal structure and the play between figure and ground. Dialogue editor John Brunetti links her to contemporaries such as second-generation Abstract Expressionists Grace Hartigan and George McNeil, noting in their shared use of bold color, painterly surfaces and spatial ambiguity an interest in exploring "the metaphorical potential of the figure and landscape as seen through Modernism's distortions." Himmelfarb has said, "Ideas are the basis of my paintings. Subject matter enters, not as something to be represented, but as an instrument for conveying an idea." She described her expressive tools as the "interplay of opposites—abstraction with representation, organic with geometric, floating forms against those that are static, [and] color that moves around the canvas."Sundell, Ivy. Art Scene: Chicago 2000, Evanston, IL: Crow Woods Publishing, 2000, cover, p. 42–3.
Himmelfarb's earlier work often referenced experiences of daily existence and drew comparisons to medieval tapestries with its patterns of flattened forms, which some writers suggest were influenced by her studio view of woodlands through the frames of flat window planes. Reviewers particularly noted her concern for composition and subtle sense of color and depth; Chicago Tribune critic Alan Artner described her 1986 show as lyrical, with "soft lozenges of color" that were "decorative in the best sense." Her paintings in the 1990s employed gestural brushwork and free-floating imagery in fractured space, creating what curator Rene Paul Barilleaux called, "highly personal, often surreal renditions of nature" that "transcend the sense of tranquil isolation often associated with traditional landscape painting." Referencing natural and human iconography, works such as Summertime and Wintertime I (1990) and Ephemerae III (1993) suggested enigmatic aspects of the life cycle and the interconnectedness of the universe.