Date: Fri 27-Feb-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

Bernstein

Full Text:

Joan Whalen To Host Bernstein

w/5 cuts

NEW YORK CITY -- On March 1, American Modernist Theresa Bernstein will

celebrate her 108th birthday. Joan Whalen Fine Art will honor this cultural

milestone with a major 70-year retrospective, on view through Saturday, April

18.

Bernstein, among other realists in this century, has been somewhat

overshadowed by the art world's focus on more abstract artists. Now,

concurrently with the Joan Whalen exhibition, Bernstein is receiving public

and critical attention as part of a two-year traveling exhibition, "The

Philadelphia Ten: A Women's Artist Group 1917-1945," which opened at Moore

College of Art and Design in Philadelphia on January 23. The group was formed

on February 17, 1917 in response to the male-dominated art group called The

Eight, later called the Ashcan School.

Born in Philadelphia in 1890, Bernstein showed early talent and interest in

art. At 17, she won a Board of Education scholarship to attend the

Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now Moore College of Art. She

enrolled in the four-year Normal Art Course for training teachers in 1907,

studying under Elliott Daingerfield, Daniel Garber, Harriet Sartain, Henry B.

Snell and Samuel Murray.

Later she studied with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New

York City. One of her earliest works, "Daniel Garber's Studio" (1910), is

included in this retrospective. In the 1920s, along with John Sloan, she

helped form the Society of Independent Artists.

Adhering to Robert Henri's philosophy that art cannot be separated from life,

Bernstein, a superb colorist, has chronicled decades of America's urban and

seaside life with a passionate intensity and energy of brushwork -- her own

expressive realism.

Last summer, her friend Jerry Jackson, director of Smith-Girard, asked

Bernstein if she considered herself an expressionist painter. She replied, "I

never thought of myself as a painter. I was someone trying to paint. In the

1920s, [art] work was going up the abstract ladder, but I kept my feet on the

ground. I believe art is human."

Bernstein translated her love of humanity into scenes depicting the joys and

trials of everyday life in New York City and Gloucester, where she still keeps

a summer home. This endlessly optimistic and resourceful artist has captured

seven decades of Americans coping with economic uncertainty. A good example is

"Waiting Room-Employment Office," 1917. She portrayed celebrating religious

rituals in "The Sedar," circa 1940; playing at the seashore in "Good Harbor

Beach," 1960; listening to music in "Music Lovers," circa 1934; attending a

jazz concert in "Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong," circa 1927; and marching in

parades in "Four Freedoms Parade, July 4, 1944."

Since her first solo exhibition at the Milch Gallery, New York City, in 1919,

Bernstein has enjoyed many exhibitions and is represented in the permanent

collections of more than a dozen museums in the United States. She has

established herself as a uniquely American realist -- a genre painter whose

work spans the Twentieth Century.

Joan Whalen Fine Art is in the New York Gallery Building, 24 West 57th Street,

Suite 507, and is open Monday through Saturday, 10 am to 6 pm. For

information, 212/397-9700.