Hugo Gellert

Hugo Gellert (May 3, 1892  – December 9, 1985) was a Hungarian-American illustrator and muralist. A committed radical, much of Gellert's work is agitational in nature and distinctive in style, considered by some art critics as among the best political work of the first half of the 20th century.

Hugo Gellert (Gellért Hugó in the Hungarian style)was born Hugo Grünbaum on May 3, 1892 in Budapest, Hungary. In 1906, the family emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York City, where they put down roots and changed their name.

Gellert studied at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design.

His wife was named Livia.

Gellert, a committed socialist who later joined the Communist Party of America, considered his politics inseparable from his art. He had said that "Being an artist and being a communist are one and the same." He used his art to advance his ideals for the common people, and much of his art depicted what he saw as the injustices of racial divides and capitalism. Often his works were captioned with slogans that helped further the illustration. The Working Day, for example shows a black laborer standing back to back with a white miner, and is accompanied by a phrase from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, "Labor with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor with a black skin is branded. "

Opposed to World War I, Gellert published his first anti-war art in 1916. His work was prominently featured both in the illustrated magazine of the Hungarian Socialist Federation of the Socialist Party of America, Előre (Forward) as well as Max Eastman's radical monthly magazine The Masses from this time. He also created numerous illustrations for Eastman's successor magazine, The Liberator, as well as sundry publications of the Communist Party USA after its formation, such as The Workers Monthly and The New Masses. Later, he was offered a position as a staff artist for The New Yorker magazine. In 1925, he moved to the New York Times.

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