Ida Applebroog: A Long Road

Ida Applebroog - Beulahland (For Marilyn Monroe) - 1987 - Oil on canvas - 96 x 72in. (243.8 x 182.9cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIda Applebroog (born 1929) is an American painter who studied at the New York State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences (1947-1950) and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1966-1968). In 1974 she moved to New York City. Her work is figurative, often suggesting narratives of everyday life, and is held in numerous public collections in the USA.

She began her artistic career by studying graphic arts and then working in advertising. Applebroog stated that she, “couldn’t make art without also making money.” She eventually left that business to work as a free-lance illustrator of children’s books and greeting cards. In 1950, she married her high school sweetheart (Gideon Horowitz) While her husband completed his degree and embarked on his career (requiring several relocations), Applebroog made jewelry in the basement of the family home, which her husband and their four children sold at art fairs.

In the late 1960s Applebroog was hospitalized for depression. She was released in 1970 and moved back to New York City in 1974 (at age 44). It was there, after changing her name from "Ida Horowitz" to "Ida Applebroog" (based on her maiden name, Applebaum), where she began to develop her own signature artistic style. She developed a series of cartoon-like figures that merged the comic-strip format with the advertising industry’s use of story-boards to explain a concept. Since the 1970s, Applebroog has been best known for creating paintings, sculptures, artists' books and several films that often explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics.

During the decades of the 1990s, Applebroog received multiple prestigious honors and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Her art was the subject of a retrospective at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., and is held in a number of public collections in the USA. She continues to live in New York and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.