Theresa Pollak

Theresa Pollak (August 13, 1899 – September 18, 2002) was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002.

Theresa Pollak's mature work features a synthesis of figurative and abstract traditions. The subjects of her work include still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and figure studies that are explorations of form, color, and space. According to the artist, “Art is not an imitation of nature, but an artist’s reaction to life.” She was most influenced by French post-Impressionists such as Henri Matisse whose work she first encountered at a private gallery exhibition in New York in the 1940s. "That my painting shall be moving in form, vibrantly alive, expressive of myself and of the age in which I live," was the objective of her works. She was a tireless advocate of modern art and the power of artistic expression writing an article in defense of the exhibition of contemporary American art at the Virginia Museum in 1958.

After graduating from John Marshall High School, Pollak accepted a scholarship to attend Westhampton College at the University of Richmond, where she earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1921. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, and her alma mater University of Richmond presented Pollak an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts on May 13, 1973. Virginia Commonwealth University awarded Pollak with an Honorary Doctorate in the Humanities in 1978.

From 1912 to 1917, Theresa Pollak studied at the Richmond Art Club under Adele Clark and Nora Houston. She then received a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York from 1921 to 1926 with artists such as modernist Max Weber and in late 1950s with abstract expressionist Hans Hoffmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1932, she was awarded a fellowship to the Tiffany Foundation in Oyster Bay, Long Island. In 1933 she was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship at Fogg Museum, Harvard University. In the summer of 1937 she studied at the Steiger Paint Group in Edgartown, Massachusetts. She also studied at the Hans Hoffman School of Painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1958.

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