CHAIM GROSS HOME & STUDIO

Chaim Gross was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains. After fleeing the turmoil of World War I and being deported from Hungary, he immigrated to New York City in 1921 as a teenager. He studied at the Educational Alliance Art School on the Lower East Side and at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, where he worked with sculptors including Elie Nadelman and Robert Laurent.

Gross became a prominent modern American sculptor working in New York from 1921 until his death in 1991. He worked predominantly in wood, stone, and eventually bronze, and is known for his carvings of circus performers, dancers, and intimate mother and child pairings in a style that combined Modernist, African, and folk forms. His work was featured in major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian, and in 1984, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Over the course of his life, Gross created and collected hundreds of works of art. For years, he struggled financially and moved frequently between studios and apartments. In 1963, Gross and his wife Renee finally purchased a four-story historic townhouse at 526 LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village, transforming the industrial space into a Modernist home with a ground floor sculpture studio. They filled the house with their extensive art collection, including important American paintings by Marsden Hartley, Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery, and Jacob Lawrence, as well as African, European, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art displayed throughout the living spaces.