ESSAY
Anita Janoff Katjanelson 1917 – 2013 | Biography and Critique
By Daphne Anderson Deeds
Anita Janoff Katjanelson was an intelligent, industrious and inventive artist whose innate curiosity and a measure of audacity thrust her into the center of the New York City art world. Initially a student of film and photography, Katlanelson became an astute printmaker who approached the medium as an evolving set of intellectual challenges. When Katjanelson began her career, many of her peers were questioning Abstract Expressionism and its emotional bravado. They began to look to early modernists like Mondrian and Malevich whose use of pure color and hard edges offered a cerebral counterpoint to angst-filled canvases. Katjanelson soon became an active contributor to the dynamic discourse on minimal aesthetics in the 1970s.
Katjanelson was born in Brooklyn in 1917. Her parents, Joseph and Fanny Katjanelson were from Ukraine, and Anita was their only child. Joseph was a musician and when Anita was young he had a music store in Brooklyn. Fanny was a seamstress who taught Anita to sew and gave her the confidence she later needed to make just about anything. In 1938 the family drove to Los Angeles, where Joseph arranged music for orchestras, and they remained there for four years. During her early adult years in LA Katjanelson attended classes at UCLA, Chouinard Art Institute and the Art Center School. When she returned to New York in 1942, she lived in Greenwich Village and studied at the Art Students League with George Grosz and with Vaclav Vytlacil, an early disciple of Hans Hofmann. During this period, she also worked for the Works Progress Administration making posters. An unusually determined and independent woman, Katjanelson seemed to know that hard work was the key to her future.
Katjanelson held a variety of technical positions during World War II. In 1943, she was employed at Telephone and Radio Inc., an ITT subsidiary where she prepared manuals for radar equipment. At Fairfield Camera, she worked on aerial camera manuals, and in 1944, she was a driller on DC-3 planes at Douglas Aircraft. These civilian jobs, though seemingly departures from her art class path, would later influence both her devotion to detail and the sense of expansive space conveyed by her prints. Perhaps the most important job Katjanelson assumed was the position of Assistant Art Director for Leeds Music Publishing Company, from 1946 to 1952.