Mitzi was a painter of celebration. Her paintings echo over and over again her sense of richness, of joy, of love. . . like her master Matisse. . . she continually strove to find greater and more expressive rhythms, fuller and more telling relationships, and bolder and deeper structures. Her paintings are odes to that which she knew so very well -the most mysterious and elusive of all the many aspects of life -the everyday, the commonplace. She painted people sitting around, talking, reading, sleeping; in and out of the light, caught up in patterns which expand and illuminate them.
- Larry Day
Melnicoff was born in Philadelphia and attended classes at the Graphic Sketch Club (now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial) and the Settlement Music School. She studied at the Temple University's Tyler School of Art from 1939 to 1943, and it was there that she first met Doris Staffel. Upon leaving Tyler she worked as a professional illustrator at N. W. Ayers, Inc., in Philadelphia. In the 1950s she worked as a freelance illustrator for Columbia Records and a number of magazines, including Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Cosmopolitan. She was an instructor at the Philadelphia College of Art from 1962 until her death in 1972.
![Untitled [Young Girls in the Garden]](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/68961b6b3189b29172d19dc9/691d480d9eee507e060643fd_melnicoff_2022.4.1_web.avif)
