Reuben Kadish (January 29, 1913 – September 20, 1992) was an American artist, specializing as a sculptor, draughtsman, muralist, painter, and printmaker. In his later career he also taught art history and sculpture in New York City. Biography Early life Born in Chicago to immigrant parents from Kovno (now Kaunas) in Czarist Russia (now Lithuania), he was the oldest of three sons. The family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1920 and it was there that Kadish developed strong roots and lifelong friendships. His father, Samuel Kadish was a painting contractor by trade but also harbored strong political interests having been, while a young man in pre-revolutionary Russia, a member of the Marxist-oriented General Jewish Labour Bund in Kovno. The Yiddish-speaking household was rich in books and magazines though the artist's father had stopped his formal schooling at age ten. The elder Kadish was quite artistic in his own right as a trained decorative painter, expert in various decorative painting techniques such as Faux Bois and marbling. He passed his artistic proclivities to his eldest son, Reuben, who from an early age drew everything in sight. Kadish also inherited his father's political activism and, as a teenager, became a political radical, leading a protest against the U.S. Marine presence in Nicaragua, which resulted in his suspension from high school. Early art career By 1930, Kadish was a student at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he befriended two young men who not only became his lifelong friends but who would later wield an enormous influence on the postwar art world: Philip Goldstein (later known as Philip Guston) and Jackson Pollock. Guston and Pollock had been classmates at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles until both were expelled for distributing satirical pamphlets. Although Pollock never studied at Otis (he moved to New York City in 1930 to study at the Art Students League of New York with Thomas Hart Benton), he often visited Los Angeles, remained close with Guston and struck up an instant rapport with Kadish. Guston and Kadish soon grew tired of Otis and set up a studio nearby where they continued their self-taught apprenticeship to Renaissance painting and the growing movement of the Mexican muralists. Mural period The young men would soon make a big impression on the famed Mexican muralist and left-wing firebrand, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Kadish had volunteered his services to the