ARTS

Don't call her 'Mrs.': The dark works of a fearless artist are on exhibit in New Jersey

Jim Beckerman
NorthJersey.com

How to be taken seriously as an artist?

Here's one way: get born male.

Here's another, related, way: make sure you don't paint flowers, bowls of fruit, or anything else that might possibly be construed as "feminine."

Miriam Beerman, who died this past February at age 98, followed this program with a will.

The acclaimed artist, who spent much of her life and career in Montclair, was not afraid to go dark. In fact, if the 19 monumental oil paintings of the new exhibit "Miriam Beerman: Nothing Has Changed," running through Dec. 11 at the DiMattio Gallery at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, are any indication, she gloried in it.

Gulags, concentration camps, the Biblical plagues of Exodus, monsters that look like people and people who look like monsters are some of the images that fill two floors of the exhibit space in the university's Rechnitz Hall. Most were painted between 1963 and the early 2000s.

"Miriam Beerman: Northing Has Changed"

"She's not interested in painting pretty paintings," said guest curator James Yarosh, whose own James Yarosh Associates Fine Art Gallery in Holmdel will be hosting a concurrent exhibit of Beerman's work.

"It was a time when women's voices were not heard in the art world," Yarosh said. "To be noticed, she had to paint subjects where she could be taken seriously. Pretty still lives and flowers were not going to prove her mettle."

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It's not just Beerman's subject matter that challenges.

Hers was the age of abstract expressionism: of raw energy and brute force, of Jackson Pollock flinging paint at the canvas. It is, in some ways, a macho aesthetic.

Beerman, a "humanist expressionist" (because she painted human figures, not just streaks and splotches) was, at just five feet in height, prepared to be just as muscular as her male counterparts.

"I think she was very primal in her execution," Yarosh said. "She was take-no-prisoners with her artwork. She's an unafraid painter. She was definitely a giant, regardless of her physical stature. "

She cakes her paint thickly on the canvas. She paints in broad, energetic streaks and swirls. At times she uses screaming, iridescent colors that leap out at you like a neon sign. "She's a magnificent colorist," Yarosh said.

Elsewhere the shades are delicate pastel, like a child's chalk drawing, or they shimmer like a mosaic (some of her pieces have pasted-on sequins and spangles, like a collage).

But the most striking things are the human figures.

Screaming, teeth-baring, frowning at the very least, as in the show's signature piece, "Nothing has Changed" — Yarosh calls it her "Mona Lisa" — most of her subjects don't seem to be enjoying themselves much.

Nothing Has Changed

"This is an artist who is painting of her times," Yarosh said. "What's so shocking?"

It can be easy to forget, with climate disaster, social upheaval and home-grown fascism in the headlines, that earlier generations, too, felt they were living in an age of catastrophe.

Beerman, born in 1923 in Rhode Island and later a resident of Brooklyn and Montclair, came of age in a world of Depression, oppression, world war, and nuclear peril.

And much like an Elie Weisel — though she herself had no firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust — she felt that her principal task was to "bear witness." One of her pieces, titled "Shower II," actually is an image of a Nazi gas chamber — though it may take a moment for the viewer to realize what they're being confronted with.

"I have spent most of my life creating images that are responses to the brutality of our time," she said. "I am reminded constantly of the world's injustice. It weighs upon my mind and body."

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That said, she's also capable of a certain whimsicality. Some of her grimacing monsters have charm. And the frogs in her "The Plagues 'Frogs" (1985), seem to be enjoying themselves, even if the people they're afflicting do not. There is a touch of theater-of-the-absurd in her explorations of the dark side.

"Untitled" (1985)  Miriam Beerman

"She felt the darkness and saw the demons, and instead of going down the tubes, she decided to set up house and hold a flashlight to the monsters," Yarosh said.

Given her era, Beerman was unusually successful. Her work is part of the collections of over 60 museums worldwide. Institutions as prestigious as the Corcoran, the Whitney, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Newark Museum and the Montclair Art Museum vied to show her work.

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Yet despite the heaviness of the subject matter, and the actual heaviness of some of her canvases — some are as big as 70 by 110 inches — she was often treated lightly, if not condescendingly, by the art establishment. It had, in her time, little use for women artists. In many ways, it still doesn't. Just ask the nearest person to name a female painter who is not Mary Cassatt.

Miriam Beerman

In 1971, she was the subject of the Brooklyn Museum's first one-woman show. Which didn't prevent the critic of the New York Times from sneering at the work of "Mrs." Beerman, whom he carefully noted was also a "housewife and mother." "Certainly it shouldn't be discussed for esthetic reasons," he wrote.

"He took it back later," Yarosh said.

That dismissive attitude toward women artists has lingered — and its consequences are more than just cultural, Yarosh said.

An artist turned art dealer, he discovered Beerman's work at an exhibit at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton in 1991, and fell in love with it. He now owns one of her pieces (the show's signature painting, "Nothing Has Changed") and has been promoting her, through his own gallery and elsewhere, for two years.

Yet her pieces, which now run anywhere between perhaps $9,000 and $40,000 in the art market, would likely command a much higher price if they had been made by a male artist with a comparable resume, he said.

A good thing, in a way. Not for Beerman, certainly — or the other women artists who follow in her footsteps. But for this particular exhibition.

If the same works had been created by a man, Yarosh said, he couldn't afford to mount it.

"In that case," he said, "I wouldn't be lucky enough to be able to show it in a suburban gallery."

“Mirmiam Beerman: Nothing Has Changed.” Through Dec. 11, DiMattio Gallery, Rechnitz Hall, Monmouth University, 400 Cedar Ave., West Long Branch; 732 263-6889. monmouth.edu/mca.