Art: Optimistic Realist

Aaron Bohrod is a shy, blond, hardworking Chicagoan. Whether he will rank as a major U. S. artist 20 years from now is anybody’s guess. Undoubtedly his brush points in that direction. At 31, he has won two Guggenheim fellowships and eight art prizes. Thanks to the latest, a $200 honorable mention at the Carnegie International (TIME, Oct. 30), he went by day coach to Manhattan last week, saw a one-man show of his open at the Associated American Artists’ Galleries.

Bohrod is a naive realist whose paintings are mostly of common scenes around Chicago. In greens, reds, blues that are raw but seldom harsh, he paints sleazy streets of ramshackle houses, old women haggling at a fruit stand, batting practice in the Cubs’ ball park (where he once sold score-cards), knobby bathers by Lake Michigan. Says he: “The shabbier parts of Chicago are what intrigue me.” Less intrigued is Mrs. Frank Granger Logan (“Sanity in Art”), who stormed “It isn’t worth a nickel,” when a Bohrod picture of a filling station won top honors and her $500 prize at the 1937 Chicago Art Institute exhibition.

Very much the family man, Artist Bohrod just after his son’s birth painted a store sign, “Bohrod & Son. Est. 1934,” into a picture. Curly-headed Son Mark is now saving pennies to buy his father a paint brush for his birthday. A highlight of the current show is Still Life with Ferdinand, the toys Mark chose when Aaron asked him what he would like in a picture. Friends have interpreted it as an allegory of the Spanish civil war: the straw general on horseback towering over the pacifist bull Ferdinand, war’s destruction symbolized by the torn-out limbs of the rubber doll, monarchy lurking in the book Babar the King. Mark and Aaron both smile at this. They like the picture for the same reason others like it—because even when he chooses unpretty things to paint, Artist Bohrod’s serio-comic detail tips the scale toward optimism.