Spanierman Gallery, LLC, is pleased to announce the opening on Thursday, March 27, 2008 of
Over Seven Decades: The Art of Gershon Benjamin (1899-1985). Including landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, figurative works, and portraits produced over the course of a seventy-year career, this exhibition of more than sixty works is the first large-scale presentation of the art of
Gershon Benjamin. Drawing on his academic background and many European modernist influences, Benjamin distilled the exhaustive array of visual stimuli that he encountered into reductive, thoughtful images, using form and color to encapsulate his emotive responses to his subjects. The catalogue from his first solo show, held in 1934, aptly stated that his “theory embraces a precise expressionism” and commented that in his “nuanced studies you will encounter the evasive, evocative personality of the true searcher after the emotional ‘mot juste.’”
This exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive scholarly catalogue by Dr. Lisa N. Peters, which constitutes the first publication to make use of the extensive archive of material housed in the
Gershon Benjamin Foundation. The catalogue positions the artist within the many contexts in which his professional life unfolded. Indeed, Benjamin’s long career had many chapters. It began with his rigorous academic training in his native Montreal, where his promise was recognized from the time he began exhibiting his work. His next phase began in 1923, when he moved to New York City, married the actress Hilda Zelda Cohen, and became employed in the art department of the New York Sun, where he worked for twenty-five years. At the decade’s end, he had become part of a dynamic group of young artists that gathered around
Milton Avery, who, along with his wife Sally, inspired a freedom of self-expression and experimentation that resonated with Benjamin regarding his own view of life and art. Benjamin and Avery remained close friends throughout their lives and often depicted each other in casual portraits.
In the 1930s Benjamin was at the center of a band of artists—including Avery,
Mark Rothko, and
Adolph Gottlieb—that countered the hegemony of the patriotic nativism of American Scene and Regionalist painting by espousing what they termed an “expressionist art” that applied the inspiration of European modernism to an American context. Many of Benjamin’s cohorts considered him to be “well-off” during the days of the Great Depression because of his job at the Sun, while they scraped by or were engaged as teachers or muralists for the Federal Art Program of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.), positions for which Benjamin’s employment status made him ineligible. However, the attitude of the era—in which the creation of art should be distinct from an artist’s source of income—suited Benjamin, who derived intrinsic satisfaction from his art and, throughout his career, never sought to make a living from it or to enter into competition for prominence among other artists. Indeed, it was due to this perspective that his life’s work has remained intact and that he has remained largely unknown.
By the mid-1930s, when he showed with the Uptown and Secession galleries, Benjamin had developed a reputation as a painter of mood, who used an expressive language of form and color to capture the underlying feeling of a landscape or city view, or the internal life of a figural subject. Often his portraits suggest that their subjects have a certain reticence, as if they are unwilling to fully share of themselves, keeping their thoughts to themselves. Benjamin brought out such aspects of their feelings by capturing nuances of their gestures and expressions.
Although Benjamin showed on a regular basis in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s, exhibiting at Contemporary Arts (where he had a solo exhibition in 1937), and the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, he increasingly distanced himself from the New York art world as he shifted his energies to his home in the rustic community of Free Acres, New Jersey, a community of artists, writers and musicians situated in the foothills of the Watchung Mountains. He and Zelda spent summers at their home in Free Acres from 1936 until his retirement in 1963, when they moved to the community permanently.
During the rise of the New York School in the 1950s, Benjamin was content to maintain his own artistic path, but he continued to exhibit his work in New York and at local New Jersey venues until the end of his life. Benjamin’s close friends included some of the leading artists of his time. In addition to Avery, Rothko, Gottlieb, and the Soyer brothers, he was intimately acquainted with George Constant, Arshile Gorky, Karl Knaths,
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Maurice Sievan, John Sloan, and many others. Known for his ethereal and dreamy nature, Benjamin had an amiability and lively interest in art of all sorts that endeared him to those who knew him. Even when he was elderly, when the subject of art came up, he would come alive with avid interest, revealing the youthful enthusiasm that motivated him shortly before he died to declare: “In all these years, painting has never gotten boring for me. It is a perpetual excitement that grows stronger every day.” Benjamin’s body of work is a testament to a life guided by a steadfast commitment to a creative expression that emanated from inner necessity.
