Foreword: Looking hard, finding truth
Foreword for Face values : Silverman shines
by Peter Trippi,
editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine
“In my life’s work,” says Burton Silverman (b. 1928), “I have tried to reunite form (color and composition) with content (realistic and narrative imagery) to arrive at some kind of synthesis of 20th-century formalism with 20th-century sensibilities. I do not believe that the way paint is applied should be more important than what is portrayed. … In placing renewed emphasis on content, on an emotional and intellectual requisite in image-making, I hope that we can bridge the worlds of appearances and of insights, and thus rescue art from triviality; from ‘sensation’ alone.”
Silverman’s statement of intent acknowledges, among other things, that much of today’s realist figuration has inadvertently separated the body from the soul. Thanks to ever-improving technical skills inculcated by ateliers and other programs, our realists now can convey exactly what other people look like, but how do they (and we) actually feel about them? Achieving verisimilitude is easier than it was 50 years ago, yet only artists attentive to psychological insights can offer us something more profound, and hopefully more sustainable—truth. Though it’s not always conventionally beautiful, truth opens us to the possibility of reconceiving the world along empathetic lines.
Exploring this terrain was not the obvious best career path. Silverman arrived on the New York art scene in the early 1950s, as Depression-era social realism (think Raphael Soyer) was being sidelined in favor of abstraction. He commuted to Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art from his family home in Brooklyn, then earned a B.A. in art history from Columbia University. That technical and academic grounding has served him well; few artists today borrow so astutely from art of the past without looking derivative, nor speak so eloquently about how historical precedents can inform a living artist’s work.
From the age of 13, Silverman attended drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York, but he has always claimed that he learned more from his contemporaries, including Harvey Dinnerstein, David Levine, and Aaron Shikler, all of whom were exhibiting at New York’s Davis Galleries, where Silverman made his debut in 1956, at 28. “Those friends were my art classes,” he recalls, not only together in the studio but also studying masterworks at the Met and the Frick.
A gauntlet was thrown down in 1961 when this group presented A Realist View at the National Arts Club, an exhibition that did not provoke an uproar, only indifference. Looking back, Silverman reflects that quite possibly the fault lay with the group’s self-assertion of a movement so early in their careers. Perhaps, he suggests, the critical community withheld their endorsement lest they appear stodgy, or out of step with the modernist ethos. But, Silverman asks pointedly, “In an era when museum curators were busy introducing the public to photographs of daily life taken by Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Diane Arbus, why did they simultaneously disdain paintings depicting the same world?” Truthfulness – or at least meaningfulness – was prized in artists using modernist methods, but the painters who pursued it via what might be considered a classic approach were dismissed out of hand. (Ironically enough, photorealism was discovered and anointed 20 years later by that same critical elite.)
Silverman thought he could present those alternatives better by teaching at the School of Visual Arts, but he left abruptly in 1964 after one year, bringing to his own studio a dozen disenchanted students. (It flourished from 1971 to 2003 in his current studio-home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.) Silverman kept painting on his own terms, relying financially on his well-received gift for portraiture: He captured more than 125 personalities for The New Yorker from 1964 to 1994, and another dozen for the cover of Time. The National Portrait Gallery now owns 35 of those New Yorker drawings and all twelve Time cover paintings, as well as his own recent self-portrait. Among Silverman’s many prizes are the American Society of Portrait Artists’ John Singer Sargent Medal, the National Portrait Society’s Gold Medal Lifetime Award, and the Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal from The Artists’ Fellowship.
Silverman’s work outside the realm of portraiture has similarly attracted notice: he has mounted than 30 solo gallery shows, is represented in 35 public collections, is an elected member of the National Academy of Design and American Watercolor Society, and is in the halls of fame of the Society of Illustrators and Pastel Society of America. Since 2001, four retrospective exhibitions have appeared at museums across the country.
Today Silverman continues drawing from live models to create the references he consults to make oil paintings—portraits and otherwise. Helpful as photographic studies are to some realists, nothing matches a drawing’s capacity to get at something not seen by the camera’s eye; it is through drawing that Silverman has kept his powers of observation sharp.
“Very early in life,” he explains, “I fell in love with the landscape of the human face, where all the emotional states of life are to be found.” For decades, Silverman’s portraiture clients have commissioned him not only for his accuracy, but also for what he infers of their inner lives. Still, he concedes, “It is just a single image—an extended moment perhaps. Unlike a biography, a portrait cannot present the many complex moments that make up a personality.” Self-portraiture is one way to bypass this problem—we know ourselves better than anyone—so Silverman has created more than 20 self-portraits to date, most recently this challenging one, Beachscape (2023).
As masters from Leonardo to Alice Neel to Lucian Freud have shown, we can find compelling beauty in portraits that are not “attractive,” primarily because the artist has identified what makes the individual unique, worthy of our attention, authentic. Silverman says he is “particularly affected by images of the unspectacular and unheralded, people who have been left out of the loop. This often means portrait-like paintings in which the specific individual can also become the paradigm for the many.” Today, alas, the realist art world prioritizes models who are young or pretty; their likenesses result in easy wins that dodge the harder work we see in Silverman’s sobering, yet always empathetic, renderings of older individuals. Two paintings—End Game (2017) and Out of Time (2022)—illustrate this powerfully, along with a frank yet ennobling view of a working man, The Stonemason (2009).
Particularly notable is Silverman’s longstanding interest in depicting African Americans. Today, when so many figurative artists pursue this avenue (and rightly so), it’s worth recalling how unfashionable this was before, especially among white artists. Silverman’s commitment came into sharp focus very early on, in 1956, when he and his lifelong friend, the late Harvey Dinnerstein—an equally important force in realism’s revival—recorded the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Illustrated here are more recent examples from Silverman, including Wall Poster (2009), Break-time (2014), and At Long Last (2021).
Silverman has also sustained his penchant for juxtaposing figures with plate-glass windows—a common feature of modern life that offers rewarding distortions and reflections. The unexpected beauty and truthfulness within an ostensibly banal scene such as Mannequins (2021) have kept the artist coming back to explore its ever-changing possibilities.
Silverman’s career as a whole is a testament to what he calls “the resiliency of the naturalist representational tradition, but with a very significant contemporary stamp.” He has stuck to his aesthetic guns, and surely now is gratified and somewhat astonished that the realist art scene has found its way back toward – not yet entirely to – where he has always been. He is equally surprised that he may have been at all influential in its revival.