Life Lessons: Art of Jerome Witkin - Hardcover

Chayat, Sherry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815626177 ISBN 13: 9780815626176

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1994

Synopsis

As a master of realism, Jerome Witkin illustrates in his art the moral plight of everyday lives. His most complex and critically acclaimed works - intense, often disturbing scenes of the Holocaust - have earned him a growing international audience. Through the "virtues of descriptive vividness and accuracy, " as Kenneth Baker writes in his Foreword, Sherry Chayat elucidates Witkin's success in almost single-handedly returning to the realm of painting those subjects that are powerfully universal as well as intensely personal. Witkin believes that this is his domain as a painter, as it was for artists like Goya and Eakins. Mortal Sin: In the Confession of J. Robert Oppenheimer; Death as an Usher: Berlin, 1933; Subway: A Marriage; The Screams of Kitty Genovese - Witkin's huge and often multipaneled canvases deal with human dilemmas and current societal issues, such as the homeless, AIDS, and drugs. His art demonstrates that we bear a moral responsibility for the pain suffered by others. "I'm not just a painter, " Witkin states. "I'm a person looking at my century. We must get back to someplace where we can feel again, where we have value, a sense of the future."

About this title

Review:

"Praise for Jerome Witkin... "Few artists today are able to do what Jerome Witkin can do with paint.... Witkin challenges us to extend and deepen our encounters with, and our perception of, reality." - The Christian Science Monitor "Witkin's only peer is Lucien Freud." - Kenneth Baker, art critic, San Francisco Chronicle "An indelible, pungent force.... A breakthrough in post-Cold War art." - The Los Angeles Times "Jerome Witkin charges the realism of his paintings with Action-Painting technique, tour-de-force draftsmanship and emotionally loaded narration." - Art in America "Dreams in the grand visionary manner of the Old Masters... painted with the rhapsodic abandon of pure sensation.... Unequivocal masterpieces." - Donald Kuspit, Art Historian "Perhaps the greatest figurative painter alive." - The Jewish Journal"

About the Author:

Jerome Witkin is professor of fine arts at Syracuse University. His work is found in many of the permanent collections of major art museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn, and the Uffizi. Sherry Chayat is an adjunct professor at University College, Syracuse University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0815626177
• ISBN 13: 9780815626176
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160