The Jewish Encyclopedia
of Western Pennsylvania
A project of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center
William Robert Shulgold (1897-1989) was born in Kaminetz-Podolsk in present-day Ukraine and immigrated to Western Pennsylvania around 1899 with his family. He grew up in the Hill District and graduated from the final class at Central High School in 1915. He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology with the intention of becoming a commercial artist but transitioned to fine art, studying for a time under Arthur Watson Sparks. While at the school, he was a member of the Phi Epsilon Phi fraternity and the art editor of the Thistle yearbook. He left Carnegie Tech to enlist during World War I and resumed his education in 1920 at the National Academy of Design in New York.
Shulgold returned to Pittsburgh in the early 1920s to become an art instructor. He worked under Samuel Rosenberg at the Irene Kaufmann Settlement’s Neighborhood Art School for five years in the 1920s. He was a part-time instructor in painting and decoration at the Carnegie Institute of Technologies’ Night School in the late 1920s. In the early 1930s, he taught an etching class at the Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Association. Among his students were Edward Goodman, Charlotte Reizenstein, and Milton Weiss.
Shulgold joined the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and exhibited regularly throughout Pittsburgh in the late 1920s and 1930s, including at the B. K. Elliot gallery, the Carnegie Institute, Wunderley Gallery, the J. J. Gillespie Co., the Keystone Athletic Club, the Gulf Tower gallery, and the Junior League of Pittsburgh. He was also included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1926 and 1933. He participated in a Depression-era exhibit at the Warner Theater in 1933, where artists could barter paintings for butter and eggs.
Shulgold was part of a small group of Pittsburgh painters who exhibited outside the city, including at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1926 and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1935. He was invited to join the Old White Art Colony at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. in 1934. While living at the colony, he also participated in the Garden Theater, which produced plays. He exhibited at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 1926 and 1933.
Shulgold became a successful portrait painter in Pittsburgh. He painted portraits of several notable Pittsburghers, including Homer Saint Gaudens, Oliver Kaufmann, John C. Bowman, Dr. John B. “Jock” Sutherland, Dr. Solomon B. Freehof, and Stephen Foster.
Shulgold relocated to New York by 1937 and then Los Angeles, where he remained until his death. He maintained ties with Western Pennsylvania and continued exhibiting here.