“When thinking of the most prominent American artists of the 1940s, the names Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, and Jackson Pollock come to mind, but not Arthur Szyk, who was perhaps the most significant of them in his response to the events and problems of that decade.”

— Donald Kuspit
ArtForum, 2018

“Szyk was in and out of his time. He was not simply an unrelenting anti-Nazi or a New Deal propagandist or a committed Zionist. He was also the most imaginative Torah scribe and illuminator of 12th-century Toledo, the Jewish genius of Persian miniatures who never existed.”

— J. Hoberman
Tablet Magazine, 2017

“In his dexterity, Szyk recalls a bygone age of monastic scribes slaving over parchment pages.
[His] illustrations … are more intricate than Swiss watch works and sublimely obsessive.”

— Michael Kimmelman
Chief Art Critic, The New York Times, 2008

“Arthur Szyk’s drawings are evidence of an exceptional mastery of crafts and of
artistic inspiration.”

— Katja Widmann and Johannes Zechner
Curators, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 2008

“Arthur Szyk was the virtuoso caricaturist of World War II. He eviscerated his prey, yet his images were curiously beautiful, like paintings by Bosch or drawings by Dürer. He rendered Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Mussolini and Hirohito as buffoons, inflating their features into indictments of evil, yet his images are so precisely detailed that it is difficult not to be seduced by their majesty.”

— Steven Heller
Art Director, The New York Times, 2002

“There is no one more certain to be alive two hundred years from now. Just as we turn back to Hogarth and Goya for the living images of their age, so our descendants will turn back to Arthur Szyk for the most graphic history of Hitler and Hirohito and Mussolini.”

— Carl Van Doren
Art Critic, New York, 1946

“[Szyk] makes not only cartoons, but beautiful composed pictures which suggest, in their curiously decorative quality, the inspired illuminations of the early religious manuscripts. His designs are as compact as a bomb, extraordinarily lucid in statement, firm and incisive of line, and deadly in their characterizations.”

— Thomas Craven
Art Critic, New York, 1940s

“To call Arthur Szyk the greatest illuminator since the sixteenth century is no flattery. It is the simple truth which becomes manifest to any person who studies his work with the care which it deserves.”

— Cecil Roth
Historian, London, 1940