Irving Petling Biography
Irving Burnell Petlin was born in Chicago in 1934. His parents, Samuel and Rose (Cohen) Petlin, were Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father had been a cantor in Poland and worked in a cleaning factory, removing stains from patterned silk; his mother was a housewife. Forty-nine members of his father's family died in the Treblinka extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, a tragedy that informed his art.
Petlin didn't read children's books as a boy; instead he read the newspapers that his father brought home from work and allowed himself to be absorbed in the news about the Second World War and the fate of Poland. His talent for drawing led an elementary school teacher to suggest that his parents attend children's classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Irving's obvious artistic abilities helped him earn a scholarship to the Art Institute, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in fine arts. He then earned a master's degree in fine arts at Yale, where he studied with the influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.
Petlin added pastels to his artistic quiver in 1960, after serving in the U.S. Army. On a trip to Paris he stopped at the same art shop in Montmartre where Degas once bought his pastels. He recognized the difficulties in using the medium but soon mastered it.
Pastel is the unforgiving medium: there is no turning back, every move is indelible,” he wrote in 2012 for an exhibition at the Kent Fine Art gallery in Manhattan, explaining his attraction to the “gambling nature” of use of crayons.
He added: “There is a fascination with risk and foresight on a developed surface waiting for the final dips of color to bring into focus everything that is already there: the bolt of color that refines an image.”
Petlin used pastels for "Hundred Fighting Men," a series he drew in 1962 after witnessing riots in Paris in which demonstrators, who had been protesting the war in Algeria, were killed by French police officers. In 2016 the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago included his work in a group exhibition of artists active in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, including Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and Seymour Rosofsky.
