Boris Margo

American painter, printmaker, 1902–1995

BiographyBorn in Volochisk in Ukraine in 1902, Boris Margo immigrated to New York City in 1930. His art studies began at the Polytechnik of Art in Odessa and in 1924, he received a grant to study in Moscow. Following his move to the United States, Margo studied at the Roerich Museum for two years before he began teaching there. Margo became deeply involved with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism while in New York, working as an assistant to Arshlie Gorky and sharing an apartment with Mark Rothko.

In the early 1940s, Margo developed and named the cello cut printing method in which a plastic plate is created and worked to be printed either as a relief or as an intaglio print, or both. Margo's early cello cuts were collected by major museums, and he received awards and purchase prizes for his experimentation in printmaking. In 1947, Margo joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York and travelled as a visiting artist and professor throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. His cello cuts are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

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