Anthony Eterovich
(Cleveland, Ohio, 1916 - 2011, Cleveland, Ohio)
American
Anthony Eterovich was born in Cleveland, Ohio to parents who had emigrated from Brač, Croatia, in 1900 amid the local failure of wine, shipping, and fishing industries. The artist’s father, George Eterovich, worked in Cleveland’s steel industry.
Eterovich began painting at the age of twelve, and as a teenager studied life drawing at Merrick House Settlement in Cleveland. In 1934 he graduated from Lincoln High School and had his work featured in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show, a notable honor for a young artist. He received a full scholarship from the Cleveland School of Art (now known as the Cleveland Institute of Art), graduating in 1938 with a degree in portraiture. He continued his education at Western Reserve University, where he earned both a Bachelor of Science in Education (1941)and a Master of Arts in Art Education (1947). Between completing these degrees, he spent two years (1943–1944) as a US Army Sergeant Tech Four during World War II, tasked with creating topographical maps and other detailed layouts of terrain. During this time, he also completed over thirty portraits of his fellow soldiers and officers. He later continued to grow his talents through extended studies at both Ohio University (1948–1949) and with the New York Art Students League (1950–1954).
From 1941 through 1978, Eterovich worked as a teacher in the Cleveland Public School System. He also began teaching evening, weekend, and summer classes at the Cleveland
Institute of Art as an adjunct professor in 1951, not retiring from this position until 2005. He continued to enter the May Show, with his work featured on fifty-five occasions, including first prize awards in 1947 and 1954. He also frequently showed his work at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown and the Canton Art Institute.
Eterovich’s training prepared him to work ably in both painting and drawing, and to base his imagery on focused observation of everyday life. Across his career, he moved from portraiture and figure drawing in the 1930s and early 1940s into greater stylization of landscapes and figures by the mid-1940s, mixing elements of whimsy and reality to realize qualities of magical realism. By the 1950s his oeuvre also expanded into abstraction—he won a notable purchase award from the Butler Institute in 1951 for an abstract oil painting titled The Merry Bench. He became interested in the emergence of photorealism in the 1970s and pursued this style, before
venturing back into magical realism during the later years of his career.