Louis Goodman Ferstadt

1900-1954

Louis Goodman Ferstadt's birth in 1900 in the small Ukrainian town of Berestechko was memorable since it coincided with a severe pogrom against the Jewish community. 

The Ferstadt family left Berestechko in 1910 and settled in Chicago.

Ferstadt studied at Hull House in Chicago and at the Chicago Art Institute.  He also was on the art staff of the Chicago Tribune. At age 23 he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. He moved to New York and, when his scholarship money ran out, enrolled in the Educational Alliance Art School. Ferstadt and his older brother, Benjamin, were living in Brooklyn in 1925. In 1928 Ferstadt had his first one-man show at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a Reconstructionist synagogue.  

Ferstadt married an artist, Sophie Freedman, on January 16, 1930 in Brooklyn.  They lived in Brooklyn on Clinton Street and Ferstadt described his occupation as "portrait painter." Their daughter, Lorna, was born November 21, 1931. A year after her birth, Ferstadt participated in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum. Lorna also became an artist and had her own exhibit at City College in 1947.

According to Ferstadt's grandson, Jerry Graham, Ferstadt was a lifelong communist. In 1936 Ferstadt was a member of the American Artists' Congress, an anti-fascist organization which was a successor to the communist John Reed Club. Ferstadt's art reflected his leftist politics. His painting of two nude women, Friendship, was regarded as offensive and was removed from an exhibition at the Marguery Hotel in Manhattan. 

Many of his mural themes focused on women. In early 1935 the principal of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn rejected Ferstadt's proposed design for a mural over the objections of the majority of the students, the art teacher, and the chairwoman of the exhibition committee of the Mural Painters Society.  In the principal's opinion, "The paintings seem to me to be too realistic and modern and lacking in the inspirational qualities which I feel should characterize paintings for a high school.
 
Ferstadt worked extensively on murals during the 1930's some of which was done under the auspices of the WPA art programs. In 1935 he joined Mexican mural painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros who had established the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop in New York. Murals seemed to be Ferstadt's calling.  He made "technological innovations in the mural format, including collapsible, revolving, electronic and motorized murals.

Ferstadt was an organizer for the AFL's Mural Painter's Guild. In 1937 he supervised a mural at Hunter College in New York. A photograph in the Smithsonian archives shows him painting the mural, Famous Women in Mythology, which is supposedly at Hewley College at 66 Second Ave in New York City. This location was most likely the Anderson Theater which opened in 1926 for Yiddish productions of both vaudeville and films. His painting, Night Life, was on display in 1937 at the Galleries of the Architectural League, an exhibition of models of proposed murals for World's Fair. For the 1939 World's fair in New York, Ferstadt painted two murals at the nearby entrance to the Flushing Meadows subway: Security-Work and Democracy - Peace. 

"Ferstadt actually made his living by creating strange and fascinating narrative-picture poems called comic strips for this new thing called the comic book, which had been invented only a few years before. As early as 1926 Ferstadt was producing the comic strip, The Kids on Our Block, for the New York Evening Graphic. He also illustrated a children's book titled, Peek-a-Boo. 

"Ferstadt went into comic book art in the 1930s. He worked through studios like Demby, Eisner/Iger and Funnies Inc. From 1942 to 1945, he had his own shop, the Ferstadt Studio, which employed among others Harvey Kurtzman.  Ferstadt has done art on titles by Quality Comics (Plastic Man, The Human Bomb), Fox (The Bouncer), Timely/Atlas (Red Raven, The Vision, Whizzer), National/DC (Flash, Green Lantern) and Harvey (The Black Cat, Captain Freedom).

Ferstadt died of a heart attack at a camp in Phoenicia, New York in the summer of 1954.  His works are in many collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tel-Aviv Museum, New York Public Library, and the Biro-Bidjan in Russia.
 
Sources:
(1)  Ancestry.com
(2)  Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, aaa.si.edu.
(3)  Callahan, Bob, "Two Fisted Truth: Harvey Kurtzman and the birth of Cold War comics," LAWeekly.com, January 3, 2003.
(4)  Falk, Peter Hastings, Who Was Who in American Art: 1564-1975, Sound View Press, 1999.
(5)  JewishVirtualLibrary.com.
(6)  Kleeblatt & Chevlove, Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York 1900-1945, Jewish Museum of New York.
(7)  Lambiek.net.
(8)  New York Times, "Rejected Painting Wins Show Honor," January 24, 1935.
(9)  New York Times, January 14, 1947.
(10)  New York Times, "World's Fair Proposals," March 28, 1937.