SID GOTCLIFFE

Sid Gotcliffe
1899-1969

Gotcliffe was a painter and print maker, born England, he came to the United States around 1920.

Gotcliffe was largely self-taught, and his work for the W.P.A. was primitive in style.

Gotcliffe was once the assistant to Louis Schanker. He did drawings for “The New Masses” magazine a communist leaning publication as did many other WPA artists.

He exhibited extensively, including New School Society 1938, Museum of Modern Art 1944, he was included in a 1945 exhibition titled “Portrait of America” at the Dallas Museum of Art, Smithsonian 1952, Yale 1965, and exhibition of WPA Art at Parsons School of Design in 1977, and many more.

The National Gallery of Art holds one large painting of his, titled “The Departure” dated 1942, as does the Museum of Modern Art and Yale University.

This is an excerpt from an article about Alice Neel from a 2017-2018 exhibition of her work in Berlin: “and another the Welsh artist Sid Gotcliffe, whom she had painted two decades earlier at the event of a Communist-organized torchlight procession: this image of the Nazis Murder of Jews in 1936, with its explicit references to the spreading fascism in Europe, Neel’s obviously most political work.”

Gotcliffe died New York, N.Y