Critic's Reviews

Both during and after his lifetime, Moszkowicz's work was widely reviewed. Here are some excerpts:

1957   After his first solo exhibition:

E. Wretholm, MORGONBLADET-KONSTKRONIKA, Feb 21:
"The Polish born artist Symcho Moszkowicz shows in his drawings the ability to read a man's face and to express the history of human suffering ... He concentrates on simple, stolid people ... The accusing dead look you meet in these faces shakes and follows you long after you have left this fascinating exhibition."

Lars Erik Astrom, SVENSKA DAGBLADET Feb. 20:
"He does not care about patented stylized solutions. He paints direct, filled with his own pathos. His paintings are heavy, violent, but nevertheless sensitive in drawing. The colors are earthy and at the same time give a deep echo. This is art with inner value, expressing an artist who knows what he wants and has found his own proper form."

Harry Kallmark, DAGEN, Feb. 14:
"Moszkowicz's drawings are rich in value, sensitive and expressive. But there is no joy in these faces. One of the paintings shows a closed gate with a giant padlock, which demonstrates it's seriousness, but behind the closed gate the light of freedom shines. This painting is significant of the entire exhibition. The colors are sensitive and fine. There is no doubt about it, the artist has something to express. In our well planned homeland we may have difficulty understanding his vocabulary, but we should be grateful for it. There is good reason to memorize the name Moszkowicz."

Hans Eklund, KONSTREVY Feb. 14:
"Despite the abstract language of his brush, Symcho Moszkowicz has a psychological narrative talent in his cleanly planned and well balanced form. It glimmers with a shining austerity."

Carl Molin, DT Feb:
"This is painting that comes from inside, even though it may be compared with others on appearance. One may point to Scandinavian sadness at the turn of the century, to international names like Soutine, Arosenius, Kruse, Modigliani or Buffet, but in Moszkowicz's paintings one finds his own shining, suffering and refined personality. His medium is wholly picturesque and wholly artistic. One awaits with excitement his further development."

Claus Brunius, EXPRESSEN Feb 14:
"Lars Wilding wrote about Moszkowicz at great length in this newspaper. I only wish to add a few remarks. One can also compare him with an artist like Bernard Buffet, the virtuoso of expressionistic mournfullness, but Moszkowicz expresses so much more ... The details are treated with tenderness, giving a naive reflex to an art which is otherwise so modern. The effect of the exhibition is unusually refined."

1959  after his second solo exhibition:

Carl Molin, ARBETAREN Feb:
"Symcho Moszkowicz has not only satisfied expectations created by his promising debut, but exceeded them. He has become more mature and mastered his media with refined nuances to present what he wants to express. His paintings convey a mission to humanity when they tell us, without words, about the humiliation of men and the endurance of prisoners and the destitute. Nevertheless his disposition is positive. No chains can last forever. The will to survive is immortal. Also as a depicter of character he is exceptional. He shows this in a whole group of drawings. The fine red on red oil painting, "Factory" proves his artistic independence.

"E. Wretholm, KONSTREVY March 3:
"Symcho Moszkowicz previously created fine icons characterized by fascinating color and accented by light melancholy. But his grip has hardened. To express his feelings he now needs colors as bleak as poverty and greatly simplified structure for his work. He needs large areas to give an impression of bareness and solitude. Melancholy drives him in Paris to a gloomy firewall of a factory. In portraits he spreads sad black lumps. He has learned from Modigliani and maybe Piero della Francesca the ambition to express with a few sensitive strokes that which cannot be done by a forest of lines. His color may sometimes vanish, stiffening into dirt, giving a wholly perfect effect. The relations are deeply right."

Lars Erik Astrom, SVENSKA DAGBLADET Feb:
"The Polish born artist, Symcho Moszkowicz, who made his debut two years ago, had a definitely fascinating exhibition. There were mostly portraits of forgotten men, unusually full of expression. He continued along this line in an excellent manner. His large oils deserve just as much attention. Their size becomes tremendous and the dark paint looks almost entirely black in the showroom of the gallery. It is quite clear that his talent must be recognized. He is concerned with the profound tragedy of mankind and treats it while finding his way to his own style. This style is sometimes naively romantic, but mostly enormously dramatic. His art obviously has its roots in the bitter experience of the artist."

1961  After his first solo exhibition in Paris:

D. I. Meyer, ARTS:
"A collection of very fine gouaches and paintings. Moszkowicz treats men, landscapes and objects as if they were merged in his bitter and lonely soul. To achieve this he neglects colors to the extreme, using only neutral and washed out tones..."

F. Pluchard, COMBAT
"An original painter, artist Symcho Moszkowicz does not need to seek originality; it is already part of him. He creates an ample universe, mysterious and deep, but not closed to mankind. His world is reached only after a long road, and is difficult to approach. In following Bruegel, Goya, Soutine and Buffet, he claims rights for homeliness and freedom to reform nature in the human face. Here, however, the presentation is constructive. Ugliness is made beautiful and justified. Most of the great contemporary artists turned to problems of ugliness, insecurity and chaos. As opposed to Garzou, for example, Moszkowicz solved the problem at once, presenting the question and answering it immediately. He paints human faces. It is not without reason that they reveal ruined houses, entire towns devastated like those you may sometimes find in his landscapes. His vision is splendid and tragic; promethean. To this ruin of a man the artist who is a man himself replies with cynicism, which is a lesson of infinite courage. In his powerful universe men leave little to destiny. Their struggle is painful, sure and nearly always triumphant. Ordinary people on the street, princes, tramps or the wealthy prove their greatness, their moral force, their dignity and pride. There is no room for weakness. All this is presented in simple poetic language without one empty phrase. Many a modern theorist forgot man and his life, but there is no art without them. Rejecting this common trend, Moszkowicz combines man and nature to develop eternity. He dislikes color effects and anecdote. He is aware of the potentials of both, but repudiates them. His choice is different: delicacy of the stroke, inspiration and expression maintained by incomparable technique. It is an exhibition which must be seen in order not to miss an important event."

1969  After the retrospective exhibition at Galerie Lambert:

Marianne Colin, LA TERRE RETROUVEE June 1:
"His portraits are impressive, solemn and static; deeply moving. We find the same motionless pathos in his landscape and still life. The objects become personified. Flowers, windows, factory chimneys or prison bars rise in a Kafkaesque surrealism. One may go back to the mystical poetry by Verlain. Truly grey, black and white are mostly the colors of his small paintings of the Paris period ... Moszkowicz purposely worked with a limited palette. He did not seek effects and therefore the delicate beauty of his colors and technique prove his possibilities. ... In his abstract paintings we see energetic composition and balance in forms. One regrets that numerous works got lost, perhaps forever. As it is, anyway, the exhibition is a cry of suffering filled with power and unusual nobility."

1978  After the retrospective exhibition at the Queens Museum:

Malcom Preston, NEWSDAY, Oct. 12:
"The road from Poland to Russia, to Sweden and to Paris was a long and often torturous one for Symcho Moszkowicz. There is in his painting, now being given its first major New York retrospective at the Queens Museum, all sorts of evidence tracing the chaos, brutality and wandering that marked his life."

"Three major themes seem to dominate his work - the factory, the railroad, and people. It is the last of these that contains the most powerful of Moszkowicz's expressions, although his experiences as a member of a forced labor battalion show up in the factory paintings and his years as a wandering, displaced person no doubt have to do with the railroad image."

"It is the countless drawings and paintings of heads - some faceless, some blurred and indistinct - that contain his compassion for the human wreckage in eastern Europe following the war. Heavy surfaces, dark brooding color, often accented with blood-like reds, mark his oils. Over and over again, Moszkowicz gives us illusive expressions, fleeting glimpses of an eye, a tight lipped mouth, a taut, agonized stance. These are people for whom oppression, persecution and anguish have become a way of life. And in Moszkowicz they have found a powerful, expressive voice."

From the introduction to the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition at the Queens Museum, written by Janet Schneider, director:

"Moszkowicz's experiences during the war indelibly marked his moral, metaphysical and aesthetic commitments, and as such, his personal history cannot be separated from an understanding of his art."

"His painting was a process of slow assimilation. Only after a subject had become internalized could he find the motivation and the means to commit it to canvas. His subjects, a solitary figure or face, a factory or a locomotive, are simplified and repeated again and again until he had come to terms with what for him was their essential nature. Once realized, he experienced the certainty of self recognition. As he wrote in 1953, "How strange the discovery, when in exploring the depths and secrets of painting, one encounters one's own self."

"The personal tragedy of Symcho Moszkowicz was one that was shared by millions of Europeans. But the message is sometimes more poignant when heard from one voice. Moszkowicz was witness to an era enveloped by cataclysmic societal and political forces which capriciously milled the fate of a generation. His images, brutalized yet poetic, are the testimony of one who emerged from the Holocaust with scars clearly visible, but spiritually intact."

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