JOSEPH MARGULIES

1896-1984

Although Joseph Margulies was born in Vienna and moved as a youth to New York City where he received most of his art education, he found one of the central themes of his life's work in the coastal views, fishermen, and small town life in and about Gloucester and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. When he published his first Gloucester subject, A Gloucester Fisherman, as the cover for the Literary Digest in April of 1933, he had already published a Maine Coast Fisherman on the cover of the same magazine in August of 1931.  In France in the 1920's he had made a lithograph Hauling the Nets (Casis). In the years immediately following his first Gloucester pictures, Margulies took up summer residence there and began to paint Gloucester and Cape Ann subjects. In his winter studio at 310 West Street in New York, he continued his other subjects; portraits of famous New Yorkers, studies of Jewish life in New York, and AshCan subjects that became the 1930s Social Realist commentaries of the Great Depression. 

   For the rest of his life, Margulies work was divided between Cape Ann work of the summer, among other subjects.  He was adept at oil, watercolor, pastel, etching, aquaint, and lithography, as well as prodigious draftsmanship.  All these media were brought to bear on his Gloucester subjects.