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Symeon Shimin (1902-1984)
Symeon Shimin was born on the Caspian Sea in Astrakhan, Russia. His family immigrated to the United Sates in 1912. Shimin apprenticed himself to a commercial artist at age sixteen to help support his family and attended art classes at Cooper Union in the evenings. He was briefly a studio assistant to the artist George Luks and in 1929 left for travels in Spain and France. In 1938, under the WPA program, he was awarded a contract to paint a mural in the Department of Justice building in Washington. Beginning in 1950, Shimin illustrated more than 50 children’s books, of which he also wrote two. His ferocious drawings for Joseph and Koza or the Sacrifice to the Vistula (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970) captured the text by I.B. Singer with surreal energy and mythological terrors.
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