Horace Brodzky

Horace Ascher Brodzky (30 January 1885 – 11 February 1969) was an Australian-born artist and writer most of whose work was created in London and New York. His work included paintings, drawings and linocuts, of which he was an early pioneer. An associate in his early career of many leading artists working in the Britain of his period, including Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Mark Gertler, and members of the Vorticism movement, he ended his life relatively neglected.

Early life Brodzky was born in 1885, in Kew, Melbourne, to the Australian journalist Maurice Brodzky, a Jewish immigrant to Australia from Poland, and his wife Flora, née Leon. His brother was Alfred Tennyson Brodney who married the activist May Brodney. In his youth he assisted with the production of his father's magazine, Table Talk.

Brodzky studied initially at the National Gallery School in Melbourne.

London In 1908, Brodzky went to London where he studied during 1911 at the City and Guilds South London Technical Art School. He became an acquaintance and follower of Walter Sickert. Amongst his friends was Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who created in 1913 a portrait bust of Brodzky (now in the Tate Gallery, London), and whose biography he wrote in 1933. Brodzky is said to have been so engrossed in talk when he visited Gaudier-Brzeska's studio in the King's Road, that he missed the last bus to Herne Hill where he lived.

Brodzky travelled to Italy with the poet John Gould Fletcher, which led to his first London exhibition, "Paintings and Sketches of Italian and Sicilian Scenes" (c. 1911), of which one painting was selected for the 1912 Venice Biennale., During that period he was a pioneer of the technique of linocut, in which medium he has been said to have "excelled". His early oils reveal the influence of both Gertler and Bomberg. However, his initial success withered in the 1930s, during which time his marriage broke up, and from then on he lived in financial straits. In 1935, James Laver published a study Forty Drawings by Horace Brodzky. Laver described Brodzky's drawing technique as follows:Brodzky prefers the ordinary 'dip-in' steel nib, for this enables the hand, by varying its pressure on the paper, to broaden the line at will, or rather in obedience to the obscure subconscious or half-conscious promptings which guide the hand to its task. He makes no preliminary studies, draws no pencil outline, carefully rubbed out afterwards to give a false impression of spontaneity. There are no erasures or alterations. Each drawing is made 'au premier coup'. It is made very quickly, as a unity, and when finished the artist cannot remember at what point it was started. The drawing has been thrown on the paper, as it were, with a single gesture.

In 1965, 80th anniversary exhibitions were organised for Brodzky at the Ben Uri Gallery and the Oxford Union Cellars. In 1967, some of his early linocuts were reissued in London in a signed edition of 60 prints. Brodzky died in Kilburn in 1969, and his estate was valued for probate at £7977. Exhibitions of Brodzky's work were held in the Jewish Museum of Australia (1988) and at the Boundary Gallery, London (1989).