Seated Self-Portrait

This self-portrait was likely painted soon after Melnicoff graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. The young artist sits on a wooden stool in her studio, head tilted and legs splayed, as if offering herself up to her art and to her viewers. Loose, scumbled paint and turpentine drips energize the picture surface, and her weirdly reddish-brown left arm adds a further note of intrigue. 

Born Miriam Goldman in Philadelphia, Melnicoff studied at the Graphic Sketch Club (now the Fleisher Art Memorial), Settlement Music School, and Tyler School of Art. She began her career as an illustrator for N. W. Ayer & Son, Inc., later freelancing for Columbia Broadcasting System, Columbia Records, and magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour. In 1962 she joined the faculty of the Philadelphia College of Art (later the University of the Arts), where her colleagues included Jane Piper and Doris Staffel. Melnicoff first exhibited at Woodmere in Young Artists of Philadelphia (1961) and, shortly before her death, was featured alongside Romare Bearden, Sidney Goodman, Alex Katz, and Philip Pearlstein in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) exhibition Return to the Figure. In 1968 she received PAFA’s Mary Smith Prize for a distinguished woman painter. 

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