Hovsep Pushman

Hovsep Pushman (1877-1966) was an Armenian-American painter whose contemplative still lifes of Oriental subjects secured him a devoted collector following during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Armenia, then a region of the Ottoman Empire and later a Soviet republic at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, Pushman showed remarkable early promise. In 1888 he enrolled at the Imperial School of Fine Arts in Constantinople to begin his formal artistic training. In 1894 he journeyed to the United States and settled in Chicago, where he furthered his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1910 Pushman traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, studying under Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury, and Adolphe Déchenaud. These teachers encouraged him to explore his own Eastern roots, and he subsequently embarked on a tour of the Orient, where he encountered the exotic subject matter and objects that would become the signature elements of his mature work. Pushman became a United States citizen in 1915. From 1916 until 1919 he maintained a studio at the celebrated Mission Inn in Riverside, California.

By the time Pushman opened his own studio in New York in 1921, he was devoted to a single guiding subject: Oriental mysticism. His paintings from this mature period typically feature Oriental idols, pottery, glassware, and other objects invested with rich symbolic and spiritual associations. He often accompanied his exhibited paintings with printed readings that helped explain the allegorical significance of each composition. As Edith Weigle observed in her April 15, 1941 Chicago Sunday Tribune article on his upcoming exhibition, "always there is age-old wisdom and symbolism of oriental culture in his pictures. Each object in the composition has its own inevitable place, its own special meaning which, blended with the whole, creates one single impression of great spiritual quality and of eternal beauty. Nothing could possibly be subtracted from any of his paintings; nothing added."

Pushman was not an artist who looked to others for inspiration, with the notable exception of Chardin. Like Chardin's paintings, Pushman's work possesses a musical quality in its harmonious use of color, form, composition, and brushwork. He returned to Chicago at various points and continued to paint both portraits and still lifes, and he exhibited widely in Los Angeles throughout the 1920s and 1930s, even though New York eventually became his permanent home. He died in New York City in 1966.