Celebrating Arthur Szyk,

Master Illustrator

Arthur Szyk, an illustrator born in Poland, started his workdays at dawn in his Manhattan studio. He was deft and prolific, and rarely needed to make preliminary sketches. In the 1940s, for publications like Time, Esquire and The New York Post, he caricatured villains, including Axis leaders and Ku Klux Klan members.

Szyk (pronounced shik) sardonically ornamented the drawings with gilded flourishes that made his works into modern versions of illuminated medieval manuscripts. Eleanor Roosevelt called him a “one-man army.” The art critic Edward Alden Jewell praised his art as “irradiated with bitterly suave humor.”

He also designed posters, postage stamps, playing cards and theater sets. In 1940 he illuminated a version of the Haggadah, the order of service for the Passover Seder. Printed on vellum, his images of Jews and their oppressors, sometimes in modern dress, convey the stories of ancient battles for freedom. The limited edition volume originally sold for about $500.

“It was the most expensive new book in the world at the time,” said Irvin Ungar, a former rabbi who runs an antiquarian bookstore, Historicana, in Burlingame, Calif., that specializes in Szyk’s work.