Gellert, Hugo
GELLERT, HUGO (1892–1985). Famous as one of the least overtly political artists of the Masses magazine, Hugo Gellert devoted most of his long political life to the Communist movement and in particular to its Hungarian language group, of which he was unquestionably the most famous member. Born in Budapest, the son of a tailor, Gellert moved with his family to New York at the turn of the century. By his teens, he had developed a double life. He Americanized himself easily, through literature, work as a machinist, and early design work on posters. Simultaneously, he became active with his older brothers in the Hungarian language federation of the Socialist Party, where he gained minor celebrity as an amateur athlete.
Gellert reached his artistic turning point when he attended the National Academy of Design and won a prize trip in 1914 to Paris. He intended to enroll at the Académie Julian, but instead was drawn to the sweeping style of contemporary commercial art, specifically the Michelin tire posters. After a walking tour across Europe, he returned to New York and drew anti-war cartoons for the Hungarian American daily Elöre, while making his living in commercial lithography. In 1916 he gravitated to the Masses, and while not joining the staff, he contributed some of the most memorable drawings, famous for their innocence, occasional abstraction, and apparently nonpolitical character, and likewise for his vivid antiwar cover drawings. He was also a close personal friend of John Reed.
With the Liberator, founded to replace the suppressed Masses, Gellert abandoned abstraction for political themes, drawing its first cover and serving on its editorial board until the magazine’s last days. Its closing in 1922 “keenly felt,” as he recalled, he helped found the New Masses later in the decade and contributed illustrations in a variety of styles to its pages. He made a commercial living contributing generally realistic illustrations to the New York World and the New Yorker. During the Depression, he exercised wide influence as director of the John Reed School of Art, chair of Artists Committee of Action, and initiator and prominent activist of the American Artists Congress and a founder of the Mural Artists Guild of the United Scenic Painters. As an artist, he created the billboard design for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense campaign, painted murals for the workers’ cafeteria (at Communist Party headquarters), created Karl Marx’s Capital In Lithographs (1933), and exhibited his work widely.
Gellert was also extremely active with the Hungarian American Left, drawing frequently for Elore and campaigning on nationally related issues. He played a key role in the 1927 formation of the Anti-Horthy League (against the existing Hungarian government), the second antifascist movement after the Italian American anti-Mussolini efforts. During the Second World War, he joined actor Bela Lugosi, composer Béla Bartók, and others in a wide Hungarian American mobilization.
During the 1950s–1970s, he continued to contribute his art widely, on racism, militarism, and (in a noted poster for Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Employees Union) the cause of unionism. His noted mural of social life in the US, created for the cooperative Seward Park Housing Corporation, has been threatened with demolition repeatedly, but remains intact to this date.
Further reading
Deák, Zoltán, ed. This Noble Flame: Portrait of a Hungarian Newspaper in the USA, 1902–1982. New York: Heritage Press, 1982.
Gellert, Hugo. Interview by Paul Buhle. Oral History of the American Left. Tamiment Library, New York University.
Hugo Gellert Papers: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution