Harold Tovish

Harold Tovish (July 31, 1921 – January 4, 2008) was an American sculptor who worked in bronze, wood, and synthetic media.

His father died during the Great Depression and his destitute mother placed his older sisters in foster care and sent young Tovish to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York.

Tovish taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the early 1950s, he became concerned with the destructive consequences of science and technology, portraying humankind confronted with the machinery of "progress".

[2] Hilton Kramer described Tovish's 28 sculptures and 20 drawings that were exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as "tedious, banal, and egregiously secondhand ... the work of a provincial artist – no doublt adept in technique, but woefully deficient in ideas or imagination.

"[7] According to his daughter, Nina, Tovish "held himself to an extremely high standard and was ruthless about it" and as a consequence "he didn't leave behind a great body of work.