Jerome Myers

Jerome Myers

Jerome Myers ca. 1910, from the Archives of American Art
Born Jerome Myers
March 20, 1867
Petersburg, Virginia
Died June 29, 1940 (aged 73)
New York, New York
Nationality American
Education Cooper Union, Art Students League
Known for Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Etchings, Writing, History
Notable work End Of The Walk, (1907), Sunday Morning, (1907), The Mission Tent, (1906), and Italians In Jefferson Park, (1934), Artist In Manhattan-Autobiography (1940)
Spouse(s) Ethel Myers

Jerome Myers (March 20, 1867 - June 19, 1940) was a U.S. artist and writer associated with the Ashcan School, best known for his sympathetic depictions of the urban landscape.[1] He was one of the main organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to America.[2]

Born in Petersburg, Virginia and raised in Philadelphia, Trenton and Baltimore, he spent his adult life in New York City. Myers worked briefly as an actor and scene painter, then first studied art for a year at Cooper Union and then at the Art Students League for a period of eight years where his main teacher was George de Forest Brush. In 1896 he went to Paris, but only stayed a few months, believing in the direction and reality of his own work, and that his main classroom was the streets of New York's lower East Side. His strong interest and feelings for the new immigrants and their life resulted in well over a thousand drawings, as well as paintings, etchings and watercolors capturing the whole panorama of their lives as found outside of the crowded tenements which were their first homes in America.

In a 1923 magazine article he explained why cities were his greatest source of inspiration:

“All my life I had lived, worked and played in the poorest streets of American cities. I knew them and their population and was one of them. Others saw ugliness and degradation there, I saw poetry and beauty, so I came back to them. I took a sporting chance of saying something out of my own experience and risking whether it was worthwhile or not. That is all any artist can do.”[3]

From the exhibition catalog Ashcan Humanists: John Sloan & Jerome Myers[4]

The Early Years

"Backyard" 1888, oil on board

Born in Petersburg, Virginia, Jerome Myers was one of Abram and Julia Hillman Myers' five children. As their father was often absent, the Myers clan was raised by their mother and eventually lived in Trenton, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From time to time, the siblings were placed in foster homes when Mrs. Myers became ill. Given these family hardships, Myers began taking odd jobs at a young age, living in Baltimore, Maryland, before moving on to New York City. Arriving in Manhattan in 1886 at the age of nineteen, Myers worked for several years as a scene painter and later for the Moss Engraving Company, where he reproduced photographic negatives. During this time he began attending evening art classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League. Even at this date, the artist's interest in urban subjects was evident. Myers' earliest oil, Backyard (1888), depicting clotheslines silhouetted against distant tenements, is today thought to be one of the first paintings exemplifying Ashcan School subject matter in America.[5] Similarly around 1893, after sketching a canal boat during a day trip along the Morris and Essex Canal, the artist made his initial sale to the woman who resided on the boat. The price was two dollars.[4]

Becoming a Professional Artist

In 1895, Myers found work in the art department of the New York Tribune. With savings of two hundred and fifty dollars from this job, he traveled to Paris in 1896. Upon his return to New York City, with only twenty dollars left, he rented, for seven dollars a month, a studio at 232 West 14th Street in a former five-story mansion, "equipped with a skylight and converted to the use of artists."[6] There, his next door neighbor turned out to be Edward Adam Kramer, a painter just one year older than Myers himself. While the latter's art training had been limited to short stints at New York's Cooper Union and the Art Students League, Kramer had acquired his education in the European art centers of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. It was Kramer who ushered Myers into the world of the professional artist. One day; when the art dealer William Macbeth arrived at Kramer's studio to view work, Kramer directed him to Myers' studio as well. Macbeth purchased two small paintings of his early New York street scenes from Myers on the spot, and simultaneously recommended that the newcomer bring additional work to the gallery. Macbeth thought highly of these two paintings and, taking them to his gallery, soon sold one to an appreciative banker, James Speyer. As an early critic for the New York Globe stated: "Myers' reputation dates from that purchase." [7] Macbeth also suggested that Myers relinquish further drawing in pencil and pastel, and turn instead to oils. In the years following 1902, Myers sold work through the Macbeth Gallery and exhibited in group shows at other venues. Significantly, in March and April 1903, when the Colonial Club of New York held its annual art show Exhibition of Paintings Mainly by New Men, among the twenty artists included were Robert Henri, John French Sloan, and Myers, showing their works together for the first time.

Summer In Manhattan

For Jerome Myers, summer in Manhattan was rich in opportunity, for when the mercury soared it was certain to bring tenement dwellers out into the streets and parks of the city. By July 1906, Myers' reputation as a skilled artist depicting the life of the people on the Lower East Side was such that a New York Times reporter was assigned to him beginning at five o'clock one morning, in order to observe the artist capturing likenesses of industrious adults at work and lively children at play. To walk through the East Side with Myers, the reporter noted, "turning off here and there to glance at some particular house or group of people,... [was] to receive an impression of a joyous life lived in the open air for much the same reason as people live in that fashion in Europe—because their homes are not as comfortable as the streets.[8] Individual responses to Myers' presence, however, were grounded in cultural differences. While the residents of Italian neighborhoods viewed the artist and his activities with excitement and curiosity; those of the Jewish Quarter, whose traditions often forbade the production of representational images, protested by the most pointed of all actions—moving away from the artist's range of vision.[8]

A Story of Two Paintings

In 1934 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased the painting "Street Group," from the Municipal Art Exhibition in Rockefeller Center. The Herald Tribune said in reporting the story that "the painting by Mr. Myers is of a group of women standing talking in a somber street, with children playing about them. Mr. Myers considers it typical of his work, and says it is the sort of scene he most enjoys to paint. 'Old streets and old houses and the people who live in them,' he explained."

"I am trying to catch the New York that is passing," he said. "I painted that down on Delancey Street seven or eight years ago and already the scene has changed in spirit. I want to get it before it is gone."

Twenty two years earlier, in 1912, a major event had taken place in Jerome Myers' life. The occasion was when the Metropolitan Museum of Art first decided to make a first purchase of a painting of his titled "The Mission Tent." Here is a quote from the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin in June 1913 talking about their purchase: "Jerome Myers for several years has been showing New Yorkers the artistic possibilities of what is perhaps the unique part of the city's scenes. He has discovered these subjects for himself and treats them in his own way. It is never the exciting moments of street life that move him, only the daily happenings, the usual things that all may see. Boys and girls playing in the square, the crowd at a recreation pier, an organ-grinder followed by a troop of dancing children, old people whom the night freshness lures to the park-bench or the wharf, a religious festival in Little Italy—these are his favorite themes and he renders them with loving sincerity and a profound appreciation of their significance."

Not only was the sale to the Metropolitan a great honor then, but it also provided him with enough money to move his family from their small studio into a studio in the "new" Carnegie Hall.[9] Over the years, with all the moving around to various studios, he always came back to Carnegie as his real home and in 1940 it was where he passed away with his friends around him. He could not have been in a more perfect place.

Obituary from The Art Digest, 1940

“American Art has lost one of it finest, most individual figures with the death on June 19 of Jerome Myers. For more than 50 years Myers, small of stature and bearing a striking resemblance to Paderewski, was a familiar sight on the streets of New York, which he made his special painting province.

The lower East Side, with its crowded tenements and struggling immigrants, knew him best and was recorded in hundreds of sketches which were later transcribed onto soft-toned canvases. The poor seems to bring forth Myers’ deepest feelings, but he did not paint them because they and their environment were ugly; he saw the beauty of their humble lives, and on his canvases he has caught that beauty...During those 50 years the cobblestones that Myers used to tramp were smoothed to asphalt pavements, the city’s center of activity crept northward leaving in its wake new, pristine skyscrapers; gas lamps gave way to neon, but the poor remained.

Though Myers later achieved wide honors—he was elected to the Academy and awarded such important prizes as the Altman, the Carnegie and the Isidor Medal—he suffered from neglect in recent years. Forgotten, for the most part, were Myers’ distinctive contributions to our native art and the battles he has fought for art freedom...Last year, as the end neared, Myers looked back on a long and fruitful life and wrote a most interesting autobiography, Artist in Manhattan (American Artists Group; New York).”[10]

Museum & Gallery Collections (Works of Jerome Myers)

Gallery of New York City images by Jerome Myers

(All black and white illustrations above are from Myers' autobiography "Artist In Manhattan" 1940)

Quotations from Newspaper Reviews and Articles

Reviews of Myers First One Man Show in 1908

Reviews of Myers Work in Other Shows

Jerome Myers' Quotations from his Autobiography "Artist In Manhattan" (1940)

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jerome Myers.

Notes

  1. ↑ "Jerome Myers". Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  2. ↑ "1913 Armory Show: The Story in Primary Sources". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  3. ↑ "The Life Song of the People: Paintings and Sketches by Jerome Myers". The Survey: 33–39. October 1, 1923. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Perlman, Bernard B.; John Sloan; Jerome Myers; Ken Ratner; Bennard B. Perlman; Darlene Miller-Lanning (2010). Ashcan humanists: John Sloan & Jerome Myers. Scranton, PA: Hope Horn Gallery, the University of Scranton. Retrieved 1 February 2013.
  5. ↑ Grant Holcomb, "The Forgotten Legacy of Jerome Myers (1867-1940) Painter of New York's Lower East Side," American Art Journal (May 1977), 78-91. 81
  6. ↑ Jerome Myers, Artist in Manhattan, New York: American Artists Group, Inc. 1940. 25. This work hereafter cited as Myers.
  7. ↑ The Life and Art of Jerome Myers by Grant Holcomb III, 1970 Masters' Thesis, University of Delaware.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Life on the East Side his Art Inspiration," New York Times, July 1, 1906.
  9. ↑ http://www.delart.org/collections/HFS_library/finding_aids/jerome_myers.htm#chrono
  10. ↑ The Art Digest. July 1, 1940. Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links