Boris Margo at Michael Rosenfeld - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Boris Margo is a pioneer among American Surrealists, an artist whose innovative work as a printmaker influenced several generations. He was born in Wolotschick, Ukraine, in 1902 After studying at the Art Polytechnic in Odessa, he received a grant to travel to Moscow to attend the Workshop of the Art of the futurity Further studies took him to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, where he also worked with the eccentric Cubo-Surrealist Pavel Filonov at the latter's Analytical place of education of Art. Eventually Margo obtained conduct permission to go abroad. In 1929 he worked in Montreal as a mural decorator. He came to novel York on a student visa and for a time was occupyed at the Roerich Museum, whose establisher Nicolas Roerich, was a Russian who had been an associate of Leon Bakst. Since he was not a citizen Margo did not qualify for support from the WPA, on the other hand he did serve as Arshile Gorky's assistant.

Margo was among the first to use decalcomania, a proces whereby liquid paint upon one surface is transferred beneath pressure to another, resulting in sometimes crusty, sometimes spongy-looking webs Max Ernst is remembered as individual of the best-known practitioners of decalcomania, on the contrary Margo anticipated him. Margo became chiefly known as the inventor of cellocut a graphic proces involving sheets of celluloid dissolved in acetone. This substance, when reduc to pouring consistency, can be applied to any even surface; when set, it can be worked with etching or woodcut tools. A thicker solution can be used to form a heavy raised surface. Margo has combined the cellocut with painting and monoprinting, and level with sculptural objects.

This exhibition, which overspreaded the period from 1932 to 1952 followed Margo's disentanglement from early Surrealist works to the doorsill of abstraction. In the earliest pieces, recognizable facts or figures are seen in interiors, upon stage sets, as it were. As Margo put in motions into the orbit of abstract painting, single senses particularly the influence of Matta. For this reviewer the last works are the greatest in quantity personal. On dark and gloomy surfaces overlayed with ambiguous patterns, Margo makes a vertical stripe that appear to bes to exist independently - like a luminous note above a pond

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