From Meteorites #2, Boris Margo

“During those years of war and revolution in the Soviet Union, Invention, daughter of Necessity, become the habitual companion of my art thinking.”[1]

Born in 1902, in Volochisk, a Ukrainian town on the border of Austria and Russia, Boris Margo studied at the Polytechnik of Art in Odessa from 1918 to 1923. The following year, with the help of grants, he participated in Futemas (Workshop for the Art of the Future) in Moscow and in 1927, studied with cubist/surrealist painter Pavel Filinov, at the Analytical School of Art in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). In 1928, the Soviet government granted Margo permission to study abroad, and he traveled to North America, living in Montreal, Canada, where he worked as a muralist for a year before immigrating to the United States in 1930. Margo made New York City his home, and in 1940, he also began spending summers in a tiny cottage in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The pull that surrealism had on Margo in Europe strengthened in the United States, where the style was gaining momentum, thanks to an influx of artists fleeing the rising tide of European fascism. In New York, Margo worked as an assistant to Arshile Gorky, and he befriended a circle of artists that included Mark Rothko, with whom Margo shared an apartment in the 1940s. Too poor to afford painting materials, Margo innovated with “decalomania,” a process in which he used automatism to select and assemble fragments of print and images from magazines. As Bernard Smith has noted, surrealists were preoccupied with discovering “technical devices for tapping into the unconscious,”[2] and decalomania soon became a favorite of theirs, most famously in the work of Max Ernst.

Margo’s material deprivation led him to experiment with other processes as well, and he is perhaps most celebrated for developing the cellocut, a form of printmaking that became popular in the 1960s, decades after Margo’s innovation. The technique involved dissolving sheet celluloid in acetone to create a viscous liquid that Margo would pour onto a smooth surface like Masonite, wood, or metal in order to create a raised surface. The thicker the solution, the heavier the surface would become. Once the celluloid solidified, Margo could alter the surface with standard etching and woodcut tools or use acetone to break down areas of the hardened celluloid. The etched plates could then be run through a press or printed by hand.[3] Typically, Margo would “line up variously colored inks onto a plate, apply a roller to the colors to mix them, ink the cellocut with the blended pigments, and print the now multicolored plate in a single run through the press.”[4] The result was a fluid composition that “well served Margo’s brand of surrealism: a futuristic universe, inhabited by strange biological and architectural forms.”[5] In 1942, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the cellocut Floating Objects Illuminated; in 1945, the Brooklyn Museum also acquired a cellocut; and in 1946, the Philadelphia Print Club awarded him a Mildred Boericke Purchase Prize for one of his cellocut prints.