Boris Gorelick

Such is the life of an artist that one can go from creating intense artwork of a lynching to painting a cartoon village for Speedy Gonzales to one-up Pussy Gato Sylvester.

The description applies to Warner Bros. background artist Boris Gorelick.

We tend to think of the three units at the cartoon studio as being fairly stable in the senior personnel after the shutdown ended in 1954 but there were comings and goings. It’s difficult to say when they happened because cartoons with opening credits were released more than a year after they were finished. We have to rely a bit on the Warner Club News staff newspaper but in the 1950s it stopped mentioning departures and omitted some arrivals.

Gorelick was assigned to the Freleng unit. Irv Wyner gets credit for backgrounds on Friz’s releases at the start of 1957. Several of Freleng’s cartoons do not mention a background artist, then Gorelick’s name appears on the acclaimed Birds Anonymous. He is also credited on Bugsy and Mugsy, Greedy for Tweety, Show Biz Bugs, Gonzales’ Tamales (all 1957), Hare-less Wolf and A Waggily Tale (both 1958). His name disappears and Tom O’Loughlin is credited afterward until the studio closed (and even later with DePatie-Freleng).

The Warner Club News does not mention Gorelick’s arrival. It does not list him under birthdays in its June 1956 issue, but does in June 1957. It reported in the October 1957 edition that O’Loughlin had been hired.

Gorelick’s birth year is in question. He claimed in a 1964 interview he was born in 1912. The World War Two Draft Card he signed says he was born on June 24, 1911 in Eketarinaslau, Russia. As a young child, he arrived in New York with his family; his father Aaron was a clothing designer. He has no occupation in the 1930 U.S. Census, the 1940 Census records him as “artist” and the 1950 Census gives his occupation as “artist, art school.”

By this time, he and his parents were living at 1770 North La Brea Ave. in Los Angeles. His Draft Card, dated Oct. 16, 1940, lists him as a “freelance artist.” The card has one New York address crossed out and replaced with another, which is also crossed out and an address in Los Angeles written above it. A Voters List for the 1944 election gives his La Brea address, occupation “illustrator” and his party affiliation as a Democrat. This shouldn’t be surprising, given his activist leanings. As you might imagine, the F.B.I. had a file on him, claiming as of March 1, 1961 he was a member of Club Number 2, Beverly-Fairfax Section of the Southern California District Communist Party. An unnamed informant is the source.

An extremely helpful book by Frances K. Pohl called “Of the Storm: An Art of Conscience” (Chameleon Books, 1995) gives this short biography:

BORIS GORELICK (1909—1984) was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States in 1911. He lived in New York and studied at the National Academy of Design, the Art Students League and Columbia University. Among his significant instructors were Nicholai Fechin, Sergie Soudekin, Leon Kroll, Sidney Dickinson, and Hugh Breckinridge. Gorelick received a Tiffany Scholarship and studied for a while at Oyster Bay, Long Island, as well as at the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Like Ribak and others of his generation, Gorelick was employed in the early 1930s by the Morgan Committee—a philanthropic organization set up during the early years of the Depression that paid artists to decorate New York City churches and synagogues. Gorelick and others from he hundred or so artists on the Morgan team were the core group behind the formation of the Artists Union, which in turn was instrumental in fomenting the Federal Art Project under the wing of the Works Progress Administration. Gorelick was president of the Artists Union for a number of years, contributed to the union’s journal, Art Front, and addressed the American Artists’ Congress in February of 1936. In 1933, he was involved in Treasury Section murals at Riker’s Island and King’s County Hospital with Michael Loew and O. Louis Guglielmi. Gorelick was a member of the New York lithography workshop from its inception, and in 1935—36, traveled to Phoenix to set up the local FAP school of art and design there. He moved to California in 1942, and during the war, did industrial design for Lockheed and the Hughes Corporation. Around 1945, Gorelick began working in the movie idustry as an animator and designer. He taught part-time at the Otis Art Institute and was involved in several mural projects for leading California architectural firms. Sources: Archives of American Art: Betty Hoag interview, May 20, 1964; Park and Markowitz, New Deal for Art, pp. 9, 88; Fowler, New Deal Art, p. 46.

The 1964 interview mentioned above reveals he started at UPA as a designer. Film Daily announced his hiring in its issue of August 13, 1945. Among the industrial shorts he worked on were Brotherhood of Man (1946), the oil industry propaganda film Man on the Land (1951) and the cancer warning short Man Alive! (1952). He continued his activism; the 1946 through 1948 Year Book(s) of Motion Pictures list him as a member of the executive council of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization (along with Chuck Jones), representing the Screen Cartoonists Guild. When the interview was conducted he was working for Ade Woolery’s Playhouse Pictures.

We’ll jump back to animation in a moment.

A 1936 newspaper story from New York reports a Gorelick piece called “Circus Wagon” (evidently a water colour) was on display at the Federal Art Project Gallery (7 East 39th St.). Perhaps his most important work was “Strange Fruit.” Pohl’s book not only reprinted the lithograph, but told its story.

A final example of the numerous images of lynchings that appeared in the 1930s is Boris Gorelick’s Strange Fruit (1939). Gorelick chose to present his condemnation of lynching in a surreal, dreamlike—or, one could say, nightmarish—manner. The title of Gorelick’s work comes from a poem written by Abel Meeropol (a k a Lewis Al1en) in 1936, which was turned into a song first performed by Billie Holiday. The first verse reads:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

The origin of the print was not, however, the text of this song. It was, instead, a newspaper story of a lynching Gorelick came across in the 1930s. In a letter he says:

I tried to incorporate and juxtapose all of the known facts of the event as reported. However, I meant it to be more than “Graphic Reportage.” It was a personal statement of outrage and protest. The story shown is of a young Negro, in the dark of night in Mississippi, snatched from his bed and family by the local sheriff and his posse, and dragged to the jail-house where the keys are thrown to a waiting mob of klansmen who lynch him by hanging him from the nearest tree. His body is later found by his wife and buried by his family and friends. It is a cry from the grave.” [Gorelick, Aug. 30, 1976, quoted in Marlene Park’s Lynching and Antilynching, pp. 349-50]

Through distortions of scale, macabre shadows, and exaggerated gestures, Gorelick achieves his “personal statement of outrage and protest.” The body of the lynched man in the center of the Composition is both present and absent: it dissolves into dust before our eyes, the dust falling into a waiting coffin; it casts two shadows, one to the left and one below on the ground. The right side of the composition is filled with grotesque hooded figures and threatening trees. On the left the lynched man’s family and friends lay him to rest. In the center of the image are the keys, symbolic of the betrayal of justice that lynching embodies. The print is a compendium of the iconography of lynching that appeared with such frequency in the works of artists, African American and white, during the 1930s.

If you wish to see Strange Fruit, it is reproduced here. A web search will direct you to some of his other works. Here are two. The first one is “Flood,” the second “The Case Of...” both from the 1930s.



In the early 1950s, newspapers mentioned some of murals that Gorelick designed and painted. He created the backdrop for Penelope at the Players Ring Theater. Ann St. John’s column in the Hollywood Citizen-News of Aug. 7, 1952 included this:

The new Brazilian Room of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel made its bow with a cocktail party showing off its new dress. It’s bound to be a popular rendezvous, for it has the lush intimacy so desirable in such a spot. We had quite a chat with Artist Boris Gorelick, who did the murals, a delightful fellow with a sense of humor. He was proudest of the fact that the Brazilian consul told him his scenes have “the feel of Brazil.” “When I finished the French Room murals recently in the Fairmont Hotel in Phoenix [sic], people asked me how long I had lived in Paris,” Mr. Gorelick recalls. He was born in New York and has never been in either place. “It’s a matter of research,” he says. “I find it all in the library.” It’s worth a trip just to look at them.

In the mid-1960s, he taught art on a freelance basis. He had one class at the Westside Jewish Community Center, and another in life drawing sponsored by the Palos Verdes Community Arts Association. 1967 was also the year Gorelick joined other Democrats in signing an open letter in the Los Angeles Times to President Johnson demanding an immediate American pull-out from Vietnam.

As for animation, it’s unclear what Gorelick did immediately after leaving Warner Bros. He found work painting backgrounds on the UPA feature 1001 Arabian Nights (1959), then was hired on April 12, 1960 to do the same (with former UPA artist Jules Engel) for Jack Kinney’s studio making Popeye cartoons for television (1960). Kinney was tied in with Herb Klynn’s Format Films, and when Format was picked to make The Alvin Show the following year, Gorelick was among the background artists. Other jobs included Linus the Lionhearted (1964, the series was originally made on the West Coast) and various shows for Filmation.

Gorelick died July 27, 1984.

For interest’s sake, here are frames from his background work at Warners, following the layouts by Hawley Pratt.


Birds Anonymous


Mugsy and Bugsy


Greedy for Tweety


Show Biz Bugs


Gonzales' Tamales


Hare-Less Wolf


A Waggily Tale

Gorelick shows a varied pallette of colours and I suspect Pratt was pleased to have someone who had worked at UPA to paint his more modern designs. Though he worked on the Oscar-winning Birds Anonymous, with Warren Foster’s story gently satirising some aspects of Alcoholics Anonymous, I’d like to think of Gorelick as a fighter of racism and social injustice through art.