SEPTEMBER 1-DECEMBER 16, 2011
Burton Silverman: THE HUMANIST SPIRIT
Burton Silverman: THE HUMANIST SPIRIT
September 1-December 16, 2011
Emily Lowe Gallery
Curated by Karen T. Albert
Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections
Hofstra University Museum
Funding for this exhibition and catalog has been provided by:
Hofstra University
Astoria Federal Savings
The Landscape of the Human Face
Over the past three years, in preparation for the original exhibition Burton Silverman: The Humanist Spirit, it has been a privilege and pleasure for Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections Karen T. Albert (curator of this exhibit) and I to be welcomed into the studio and home of the artist Burton Silverman. The selection of the works that define the exhibition were made with careful consideration of the most recent output of this prolific and masterful artist, and to underscore the Hofstra University Museum’s commitment to diversity awareness and humanism.
Burton Silverman has the extraordinary ability to present subtle examinations of an individual’s character and to present the essence and dignity of his subjects. His portrait subjects, particularly in this exhibition, represent the “everyman,” or ordinary individual, who is brought to stunning visual life through the artist’s hand, palette and brush.
It is no exaggeration to say that from his earliest days, Silverman has had a lifelong fascination with the human face and its capacity to convey complex emotions. While receiving professional training in fine art from Columbia University, he has been influenced by artists such as John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer, along with the Old Masters. Coming of artistic age at a time when Abstract Expressionism was a dominating force in the New York and international art world, Silverman, along with some of his artistic peers, such as friend and colleague Harvey Dinnerstein, faced an uphill battle for acceptance
within the art establishment. Despite these challenges, the artist’s abilities have been recognized with more than 30 solo shows in locations such as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. His works have been included in numerous national and international exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, National Academy of Design, Mexico City Museum of Art, and Royal Academy of Arts in London. His works are also included in public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum, Hofstra University Museum, New Britain Museum, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In 1999 Burton Silverman was awarded the John Singer Sargent Medal from the American Society of Portrait Artists, and in 2004 the artist was honored with the Gold Medal of the Portrait Society of America for lifetime achievement.
To provide more in-depth commentary on the work of Burton Silverman, included in this catalog is a focused essay by art historian and scholar Dr. Gabriel P. Weisberg, professor of art history, University of Minnesota.
We invite you, the viewer, to discover for yourself, through this catalog and exhibition, the power and impact of Burton Silverman’s “landscapes of the human face.” We thank Astoria Federal Savings for its support of this project.
Beth E. Levinthal
Executive Director, Hofstra University Museum
About the Artist
Burton Silverman was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. His formal art education and training includes a Bachelor of Arts in art history from Columbia University and studies at the Arts Students League in New York City. From 1951 to 1953, he served in the United States Army, where he was stationed stateside at the Pentagon.
From his earliest days, Burton Silverman was most interested in the subject of the human face and figure. Rejecting the abstract and conceptual art movements of the mid-20th century, the artist continued to paint in a realistic style. With fellow artists Harvey Dinnerstein, David Levine, Dan Schwartz and Aaron Shinkler, Silverman formed a group that, in 1961, presented an exhibition titled The Realist View at the National Arts Club, New York. This “manifesto” exhibition was mostly ignored, with the exhibition receiving one negative press review.
After teaching formally for one year at the School of Visual Arts, in 1971 Silverman began an atelier in his Manhattan studio, which he operated until 2003. In addition to his teaching, from 1964 to 1994, he completed 125 portraits for The New Yorker and additional images for Time magazine. To the present day, Silverman accepts assignments for commissioned portraits.
Burton Silverman has had more than 30 solo exhibitions, with his paintings appearing in numerous other exhibitions throughout the country. A major
retrospective of his paintings, Sight and Insight, was held at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art and The Butler Institute of American Art in 1999-2000. A second drawing retrospective, titled The Intimate Eye: The Drawings of Burton Silverman, was presented at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in 2006, and, the following year, the show traveled to The Butler Institute of American Art and the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts.
Silverman is a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society and The Century Association. He has received major prizes such as the Gold Medal from the Portrait Society of America, and in 2004 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. His paintings and drawings are represented in more than two dozen public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Hofstra University Museum, National Museum of American Art, National Portrait Gallery, New Britain Museum of American Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Behind the Scene
2007 Oil on panel 19 x 16 in.
Lifelike: The Art of Burton Silverman
By Dr. Gabriel P. Weisberg, Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894)
The Floor Scrapers, 1875
Oil on canvas, 102 x 146.5 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris, RF 2718
des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
Upon seeing the paintings of Burton Silverman, several thoughts come to mind: his canvases are of real people doing everyday activities, often in the model’s own environment. The people are more than fictional representations in paint; Silverman catches their movements, and shows them as they engage with unseen spectators. Some viewers may imagine hidden narratives that reflect life in the 21st century; to others, as Silverman says, they reflect a larger humanistic world, one where the sensitive, intuitive painter records emotions and values. No matter how a viewer sees these paintings, they reflect a continuous commitment to a much larger tradition of creativity that has existed for centuries, and which has been kept alive by Silverman, and a few others, in the face of insurmountable odds.
During the earliest phase of his public career as a painter, Silverman and several of his colleagues, among them Harvey Dinnerstein, tried to usher in a realist revival through an exhibition they called The Realist View
Although the show was not a success, it did set Silverman on the right course for his life’s work — that of creating paintings that are lifelike representations of his world. While he welcomes the use of technological aides (such as photography and projected slides), he is not concerned with getting people or scenes technically precise; instead, he attempts to reveal the inner self of his models, using tangible reality to suggest much more than appears on the surface. Through the act of painting with formal devices that have a long tradition and that includes vibrant color, strong design and drawing skills, Silverman creates images that become works of art that transcend verisimilitude by becoming more than just “lifelike.”
“We need to start thinking about art in a different way — it’s not just about how ‘real’ something looks, but also what it means.”
Whether Silverman paints men, most often workmen, engaged in common building activities such as The Stonebreaker, The Plasterer, The Stonemason or House Painter, he takes his figures out of the artist’s studio, away from formal artistic arrangements, to paint them in their own world. Similar to a 19th-century naturalist writer or painter, Silverman observes, records, examines, and probes. He wants to reveal what people do for a living, much as some 19th-century painters such as Gustave Caillebotte did when he recorded The Floor Scrapers, or workmen dressed in common overalls or smocks. But simultaneously he wants to reveal their cognitive reflective life; in the case of The Stonebreaker, the worker’s face seems pained — or confused — as if some troubling thought has interrupted his work. The man becomes familiar to us, more alive, because we share an understanding of a life lived, possibly, like our own. Silverman uses a lifetime of personal experience to convey how he sees the world around him. As he says: “We need to start thinking about art in a different way — it’s not just about how ‘real’ something looks, but also what it means.”
It is this desire for aesthetic and philosophic truthfulness that gives his paintings a sense of observed reality where nothing minor is taken for granted, and every nuance
of personality or dress contributes to the interpretation of a figure. His paintings often have an art historical relevance; the title of The Stonebreaker refers back to Gustave Courbet’s monumental painting of the same name, which Silverman always admired from reproductions. Silverman’s painting was an attempt to make a similar statement for our own time — an overreach surely — but it reveals that his source of aesthetic continuity is more than with the Naturalists alone and embraces visual tradition such as provided by Degas, Velasquez and Rembrandt. The same is true of The Stonemason, which harks back to Velasquez’s workers in The Triumph of Bacchus
Yet Silverman’s picture is also about painting the male nude and a subtle knock at the current outpouring of academically derived pictures of the male figure. The Stonebreaker is the antithesis of the body beautiful found in these paintings. “What I loved about this man, this image,” Silverman says, “was his complete unselfconsciousness about his beer belly and his body in general. He stripped to the waist not to show himself off but simply because it was a damned hot day. His identity was formed by his work, not by what he looked like.” His painting of working class people is not to depict the exploited and the impoverished laborer, as was so much a
Photo credit:
Réunion
— Burton Silverman
“What I loved about this man, this image,” Silverman says, “was his complete unselfconsciousness about his beer belly and his body in general. He stripped to the waist not to show himself off but simply because it was a damned hot day. His identity was formed by his work, not by what he looked like.”
part of Naturalist art, but rather to honor the people who actually make things — bridges, furniture, houses — by making their presence in society visible, in short, making portraits of the people who cannot afford portraits.
With the painting Chelsea Square, a seminal painting in this exhibition, Silverman has carried his visual achievements further by examining the familiar glassenclosed outdoor restaurant that seemed unexpectedly unusual. In this painting, Silverman plays with the concept of inside outside. He has seized on the 19thcentury Naturalist concept of using the “milieu” to tell us more about the people who live and move in an urban society, where the glass cages we see them in, and out of which they observe us — the onlookers — become more intensely felt. Silverman makes us aware of the curious disparities in which the privacy of eating becomes a spectacle, a sort of Peeping Tom theater for the passerby. When the diners seem lost in their own thoughts — their faces reflect the anxieties caused by the rapid pace of the modern world and the impersonal setting represented by the dark foreboding building reflected in the glass enclosure. Because of his ability to capture how inner thoughts show on the faces of the people he portrays, Silverman gives his paintings a deepened poignancy that conveys the joys or hardships of lives lived.
Recording diversity in modern life has led Silverman to see people in unusual ways: in Wall Poster, the intense
stare of the powerful black male dressed in a brown leather jacket is contrasted with the questioning, repetitive image of a young woman, recorded in posters on the rear wall. Is the artist simply contrasting the colors black and white, the white wall and the white faces against the color black of the African American leaning on the wall for an aesthetic display, or is he contrasting these elements to reveal the racial divide that still exists in America? The visual tension allows for speculation on the part of the viewer to construct a narrative that may lead to a heightened, more meaningful understanding of the people he has painted and the world we inhabit.
As a painter of women, Silverman has few peers. Whether he is doing studies of a young woman sheltering and nurturing a young child as in Summer of ’82, or several poses of a nude model moving through time and space, suggestive of the photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge, Silverman’s range is both tender and evocative. When he is studying a young woman absent-mindedly slouched in a wing chair, he goes beyond a recording of flesh and bone to convey something else. In his Ambivalence, he suggests underlying sexual tensions, issues that can germinate from any intimate moment. He has gone further than recording how a model looks by conveying an intangible effect through pose and expression, an implied sexual urge. To realize that this painting was completed in 2008 is to further acknowledge that Silverman is still at a
high point in his creative prowess as he gets to the psychological moment to convey someone who is alive, and of flesh and blood.
Throughout this exhibition as well as his career, Silverman gets it right. His paintings reveal an understanding of the Old Masters from the 19th century and earlier, effectively underscoring what it means to be a realist. There are no wasted gestures, there is no “silly posing” or posturing as is found in many of the wasted academic paintings of the 19th century, especially those in imitation of the compositions of William Bouguereau. Silverman works from direct experience, with an understanding of the character and motivations of people, and the ability and avowed purpose to create canvases that engage with an audience on many levels. If Silverman’s works did not achieve these qualities, his paintings would not touch us as they do. There can be no doubt from this survey of his current work that Silverman has passed the litmus test of enduring value. His paintings exude the kind of raw humanity that can be appreciated and understood now, will be understood in the future, and could have been understood in earlier artistic periods; Silverman’s art is universal. People drawn from the artist’s immediate environment provide the raw data for his work; their seemingly mundane lives are considered deeply in order to arrive at an understanding of their humanity.
The Stonebreaker
2008
Oil on linen
50 x 30 in.
Artist’s Statement
“I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living.”
— Barry Hannah, “Why I Write,” Harper’s Magazine: Readings, June 2010
This quote explains a great deal about my work if you substitute “paint” for “write.” It expresses in a wonderfully succinct way a significant drive in my life as a painter. It combines both the love of language — in my case, of the way paint is applied — and the content of the art, the feelings it expresses beyond the subject matter.
Very early on in my life, I felt the need to record the world through pictures. It is almost universally evident in kids; I just kept on doing it. As my understanding of art and the world grew in tandem, I found that my very sense of self was inextricably bound to that affection. I continue to respond to the visual experiences of everyday life with almost that same childhood need, but clearly it is moderated by all sorts of other concerns. Those aspects of our experience that present some ambiguous or contradictory moral equation often unaccountably attract me. Is this concern for the quotidian world also the beginnings of what might be called humanist? There is a historical context for its meaning that engages me; humanism in its broadest sense maintains that we have the ability to lead ethical lives without the constraints or the promptings of traditional religious beliefs.
This sense of secularly derived responsibility has informed my thinking and, plausibly, my art. It is not the sole “ideal” in my work. I simply like to paint pictures of people who are both specific individuals and yet, in my thinking, are also somehow “universal.” I hope this happens in my work, for in my understanding of the great art of the past, this process of converting the specific to the universal has been the characteristic that allows us to view the far distant past, as in a Velazquez or a Degas, as if it were now. I am skittish about writing manifestoes about motives – more often they fail to match the art – but I want to add this very useful quote from an essay on 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward
Burne-Jones:
“Anyone serious about Culture knows that an art unguided by an ideal is likely to be vapid, But it also true that when art is swamped by an ideal the result is likely kitsch.” 1
I do not idealize my subjects. They are often “unpretty.” In a culture saturated by the sensational — shock and celebrity — the immediate texture of our lives needs to be seen again for the “beauty” and, hopefully, the insights it can provide.
– Burton Philip Silverman, New York City, 2011
1Roger Kimball, Art’s Prospects: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity, 2003.
Ambivalence
The Appalachian Trail
2010 Oil on linen 56 x 30 in.
Break Time 2011 Oil on linen 30 x 20 in.
Study for Break Time
2011
Pencil and graphite on paper
12 x 9 in.
Central Park Arcadia
on linen
x 38 in.
x
in. “Flashdancers” Triptych
on linen
x 78 in.
Here Jane
House Painter
2011
Oil on linen
46 x 34 in.
Triptych
Nude
Triptych
The Plasterer 2008 Oil on linen 24 x 16 in.
The Stonemason 2009 Oil on linen 50 x 30 in.
The Stonebreaker
2008
Oil on linen
50 x 30 in.
Near the Shenandoah
Study for Survivor
on linen
x 24 in.
Study in Black & White
Wall Poster 2010 Oil on linen 48 x 42 in.
Exhibition Checklist
All works are courtesy of the artist.
Alabama Spring, 2010 Oil on linen 34 x 56 in.
Alabama Summer, 2008 Oil on linen 24 x 21 in.
Ambivalence, 2008 Oil on linen 39 x 30 in.
The Appalachian Trail, 2010 Oil on linen 56 x 30 in.
Behind the Scene, 2007 Oil on panel 19 x 16 in.
Break Time, 2011 Oil on linen 30 x 20 in.
Bus Window, 2011 Oil on linen 24 x 18 in.
Central Park Arcadia, 2009 Oil on linen 30 x 38 in.
Chelsea Square, 2004 Oil on linen 34 x 54 in.
Conversation, 2010 Oil on linen 31 x 38 in.
“Flashdancers” Triptych, 2010 Oil on linen 50 x 78 in.
Garment Shop, 2011 Oil on linen 17 x 20 in.
Here Jane, 2003 Oil on linen 48 x 44 in.
House Painter, 2011 Oil on linen 46 x 34 in.
Nail Care, 2003 Oil on linen 27 x 19 in.
Morning, Nude, 2005 Oil on linen 19 x 30 in.
Near the Shenandoah, 2010 Oil on linen 40 x 48 in.
The Plasterer, 2008 Oil on linen 24 x 16 in.
Return to Arcadia, 2008 Oil on linen 36 x 48 in.
The Stonebreaker, 2008 Oil on linen 50 x 30 in.
The Stonemason, 2009 Oil on linen 50 x 30 in.
Study for Break Time, 2011 Pencil and graphite on paper 12 x 9 in.
Study for Flashdancers, 2009 Black and white charcoal on sepia laid paper 16 x 10 in.
Study for Survivor, 2002 Oil on linen 30 x 24 in.
Study in Black & White, 2006 Oil on panel 24 x 20 in.
Summer of ’82, 2002 Oil on linen 20 x 24 in.
Triptych, 2010 Oil on linen 36 x 54 in.
Wall Poster, 2010 Oil on linen 48 x 42 in.
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
STUART RABINOWITZ
President
Andrew M. Boas and Mark L. Claster
Distinguished Professor of Law
HERMAN A. BERLINER
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Lawrence Herbert Distinguished Professor
HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY MUSEUM
BETH E. LEVINTHAL
Executive Director
KAREN T. ALBERT
Associate Director of Exhibitions and Collections
CAROLINE BIGELOW
Senior Assistant to the Executive Director
KRISTY L. CARATZOLA
Collection Manager
TIFFANY M. JORDAN
Development and Membership Coordinator
MARJORIE PILLAR
Museum Education Outreach Coordinator
NANCY RICHNER
Museum Education Director
Graduate Assistants
KAROLYN BROSNAN
CAROLYN DOMINO
KAITLIN SCHNEEKLOTH
Undergraduate Assistants
JOSHUA ETTINGER
MARCELLO LOVERME
Hofstra University Museum gratefully acknowledges the following exhibition sponsors:
Astoria Federal Savings
Hofstra University
Design:
Hofstra University Creative Services Department / Denise Sarian
