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THERESA FERBER BERNSTEIN
(1890-2002)
"Returning Home"
Abstract Impressionist Vintage 1960s Mid Century Modern
Original Oil on Canvas Painting
Excellent condition
Canvas is tight and colors are vivid
Great contrast
Hand signed in Lower left.
SIZE 27" x 23"
Hardwood Gilt Frame
Text or email with any questions.....thank you.
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THERESA FERBER BERSTEIN (1890-2002)
Theresa Ferber Bernstein was born in Kraków, the only child of Isidore and Anne Bernstein, who emigrated to the United States. She studied with Harriet Sartain, Elliott Daingerfield, Henry Snell, Daniel Garber and others at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women now Moore College of Art & Design.
She graduated in 1911 with an award for general achievement (the college awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1992). After enrolling at the Art Students League in New York City, where she took life and portraiture classes with William Merritt Chase, she traveled for a second time to Europe with her mother, her first trip abroad having been made in 1905. She admired Robert Henri's style of depicting the city's everyday drama.
In 1912 she settled in Manhattan. Her studio near Bryant Park and Times Square allowed her to paint a cross-section of New Yorkers; she also painted harbors, beaches, fish, and still-life. She and her husband William Meyerowitz lived for many decades in a rent-controlled loft-style studio apartment at 54 West 74th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just one block from Central Park West, and this studio was her home at the time of her death at the age of 111.
Bernstein was a member of the National Association of Women Artists and the North Shore Art Association. Her works were exhibited extensively with the National Academy of Design and the Society of Independent Artists (which she co-founded with John Sloan). Her work includes the oil on canvas mural titled The First Orchestra in America in the Manheim, Pennsylvania post office, commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, and completed in 1938. In the male-dominated art world of her time, Bernstein often signed her works using just her surname. Her self-portrait is part of the Jewish Museum collection. She originally gained recognition as one of the first women to paint in the Realist style, favoring the informal composition and contemporary subject matter typical of the movement. She hardly advertised her gender: she signed her gritty paintings of urban scenes with her last name
or ''T. Bernstein.''
Indeed, at the beginning of her career, the important thing to some seemed to be that she had somehow transcended being a woman.
"It is with a man's vision that this artist looks at her subjects -- in the streets, the elevated trains, at the beaches, in the parks, the lobbies of theaters, in seaport places or in a church,'' Frederick James Gregg wrote in The New York Herald in a review of her first solo show in 1919.
''Then having found what she wants, it is with a man's vigor that she gets it down to stay,'' he continued.
Writing in the American Art Review in April 2001, Patricia M. Burnham countered that Ms. Bernstein, for all her so-called ''masculine'' vigor, showed a decidedly feminine sensibility.
''She saw as a woman, perceived the city and its hustle and bustle very much from a woman's point of view,'' she wrote. ''As a result, she incorporated into her art types and activities ignored by her male counterparts: women readers using the New York Public Library, traveling unchaperoned on the el, making hats, creating art in the company of other women, applying for jobs.''
Others insist that her work, as particularly evidenced by her forceful brush strokes, spoke for itself.
''She was just a great painter, period,'' said Jan Ramirez, director of the New-York Historical Society's museum. When Ms. Ramirez organized an exhibition of Ms. Bernstein's work in 1991, in her previous job as a curator at the Museum of the City of New York, it was Ms. Bernstein's first museum exhibition since 1948. There have since been museum exhibitions in Philadelphia, Boston and Stamford, Conn., and three one-person shows at Joan Whalen Fine Art in Manhattan.
Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chicago Art Institute, the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum. She has had more than 40 solo exhibitions.
Ms. Bernstein admitted to being born on March 1, 1890, according to several published accounts. But Ms. Laurier, who knew Ms. Bernstein's husband of 62 years, the painter and etcher William Meyerowitz, said he told her and others that his wife was two years older than he was; if so, she would have turned 116 in two weeks. Records of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women indicate, however, that Ms. Bernstein enrolled in 1907 at age 17, making her 111 at her death.
Her father was a textile manufacturer and her mother an accomplished pianist. As a girl, she made several trips to Europe with her mother and was impressed by Expressionist painters like Edvard Munch. After attending the Philadelphia art school, now the Moore College of Art and Design, she moved to New York and joined the Art Students League, where she studied portrait painting with William Merritt Chase.
She met Mr. Meyerowitz when he noticed one of her paintings at a show and dropped by to ask her for a donation to a charity that gave artworks to the poor.
''Oh, I thought you were an older man,'' Mr. Meyerowitz said to Ms. Bernstein, who was then probably 29. She gave him several paintings, and their courtship started. Shortly after they were married, she had a baby girl named Isadora, who died two months later.
The two often painted side by side, but Mr. Meyerowitz was much more publicly prominent. Three years after his death, she revealed hundreds of her own paintings.
When she visited the Museum of the City of New York in the late 1980's to discuss a possible exhibition of her husband's work, curators decided to exhibit her work instead.
''All told, his subject matter is not in any way revolutionary,'' Ms. Ramirez said. ''She was far more the iconoclast of the two.''
She loved to paint groups of people. Her studies of suffrage parades in 1912 led to a series of works from 1916 to 1919 that documented the patriotic displays of World War I. She became close to members of The Eight, as the Ashcan School was also called, and her urban landscapes reflected this influence.
She was also associated with the Philadelphia 10, a group of women who had studied art in Philadelphia.
Her early reputation was suggested by a review in The New York Times on March 13, 1927, comparing the emotions evoked by her art to ''this little cavorting fling that reminds one of colts in pasture.''
By the 1930's, she did not follow the art world toward greater abstraction, though her husband did. Even as her palate exploded with inspired colors -- salmon skies and chartreuse cheeks -- her mission became one of breaking down the barrier between high art and everyday people.
''In some ways, Bernstein is a Thornton Wilder of the canvas, '' Ms. Burnham wrote, offering ''consoling and nostalgic images to viewers of the 21st century.''
Her determination was legendary. When she broke her right hand, she painted with her left. When she could no longer hold a brush, she painted by squirting paint from tubes.
And she never lost her eye for a touching scene. On a Valentine's Day in the late 1990s, Ms. Laurier pushed Ms Bernstein's wheelchair past a store where a couple were kissing in the window as part of a promotion.
''Get my sketch pad,'' Ms. Bernstein commanded.
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