LAZAR RADITZ

Popular early 20th Century portrait and figure painter Lazar Raditz was born in Drinsk, Russia in 1887. Raditz studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with William Merritt Chase from 1904 to 1910. He was awarded a Toppan prize in 1906 and a Cresson Traveling Scholarship in 1907. He also studied with Edmund Charles Tarbell at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Raditz’s portraits included many notable figures from the fields of politics, medicine, science, business, the arts, and philanthropy. Some of his well-known subjects were Rockefeller, DuPont, Madame Chiang-Kai-Shek, Alexander Van Rensselaer, Samuel Pierpont Langley, Richard Dale Benson, William Johnson Taylor, Robert Olcott, Samuel Fleisher, and Woody Guthrie. Raditz taught at the Graphic Sketch Club in Philadelphia (now known as the Fleisher Art Memorial), which offered free instruction in art to anyone who wanted it, and is the nation’s oldest tuition-free, community-based art school. He also taught at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moor College of Art), and in Spartanburg, South Carolina in the 1950s. Raditz’s work has been exhibited at: the Art Club of Philadelphia; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Pan-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco, where it was awarded a medal in 1915; the National Academy of Design, New York City, where it won a prize in 1918; the Art Institute of Chicago; the McClees Galleries, Philadelphia; the Society of Independent Artists, New York City; and the Ogunquit Art Center, Maine. His paintings are among the collections of, among others: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the American Philosophical Society and the College of Physicians, Philadelphia; Temple University; Brown University; Yale University; the State Capitol at Harrisburg, Virginia; and the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina.