Bernard Childs — was an artist who worked in Paris and New York. He was primarily a painter and printmaker, and pioneered the direct engraving of metal plates with power tools.
As a kind of counterpoint to his many-layered work, which is often symbolic and a fusion of abstraction and figuration, in he also started painting portraits. Childs' formal interests were line and space, light and color, and the dialogue of contrasting elements. He first found his vocation in high school, in Harrisburg , Pennsylvania where his Russian immigrant parents had moved the family from his birthplace, Brooklyn. During her last days, his mother told him he was the seventh generation of artists in the family, his forebears having been painters of icons in the churches of Yaroslav.
In , a scholarship took him to the University of Pennsylvania. He also had the luck to meet the great Danish silversmith Peer Smed , from whom he learned his love of metal. The economic and social problems of the s took Childs away from his work as an artist, until he began drawing again in the South Pacific while serving as a quartermaster aboard the destroyer escort USS Wesson , during World War II.
Childs survived a Kamikaze attack and, at war's end, two years of intermittent hospitalization after returning to New York. In , thanks to the G. Bill , he sailed for Italy where he began his full-time life as an artist. It was there that he met and became friends with Alberto Burri and Enrico Baj. Following a year in Perugia and in Rome and his first solo exhibition, at the venerable Galleria dell'Obellisco, Childs settled in Paris, realizing his first mature painting at age 42 and quickly becoming part of the European vanguard.
By he was in Documenta II and had his first solo museum exhibition, of paintings and prints, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. It was in early , after a month in December at Atelier 17 , that he had signed his first editions of prints and begun pioneering the direct engraving of metal plates with power tools for which he is well recognized. Childs was also one of the first post World War II Western artists invited to show in Japan where he had two exhibitions, of paintings and of prints in and respectively at the Tokyo Gallery, and received the Museum of Western Art Award at the Tokyo International Print Biennial.
