Boris Margo: A Ukrainian Sensibility

Boris Margo was born in Wolotschisk, Ukraine in 1902. He came to New York via Canada in 1930. Already well into his career as an artist, Margo first visited Provincetown in 1940 with his future wife, the artist Jan Gelb. He loved the natural environment and incorporating objects found on the beach into his artwork and into building and rebuilding his dwelling in the dunes. Margo returned to Provincetown each year, and died on the Cape in 1995 at the age of 92.

Margo’s long artistic career incorporates both innovation and continuity, creating new forms and techniques along with variations of existing ones. Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism are the two styles to which Margo’s art is most directly linked.