Sarah Berman (; 1895–1957) was a Ukrainian American self-taught Naïve artist and primitive Social Realist whose career began in New York City during the late 1910’s and remained active until her death in 1957. Sarah's works are notable for her primitive human fantasy scenes along with her depictions of social realism and illustrative political commentary. Berman's greatest works are those that showcase the different, naïve social fantasy she was capable of articulating. Although her works are in many museums, Sarah Berman chose to never sell a piece of art. “It is not everyday that an art exhibition starts all the strings humming inside of you. But Sarah Berman’s show… does just that. Fluent, quick, expressive lines transform common place domesticity into something rare and glorious… she paints these people with a reverence and a love that is almost holy…it is a wonderful feeling. She never had an art lesson. She found her sanctuary in her Union Square studio, far from fellow artists. Her art grew into a religion… SO deep set, she forgets she rarely sells a picture. There is bliss within and without"
as Elizabeth Sacartoff described in 1941 for The New York Times.
Biography Sarah Ostrowsky was a Ukrainian American self-taught Naïve artist and primitive Social Realist painter and printmaker whose career began in New York City during the late 1910’s and remained active until her death in 1957. During her life and career, Sarah was highly critiqued and acclaimed by numerous art critics, enthusiastically placing her works alongside the “Maitres Populaires de la Realite” family of European self-taught artists, ranging from Henri Rousseau and Camille Bombois, and to others like Edward Hicks and John Kane. Despite her primitive aesthetic, Berman has also been favourably compared to 19th Century artists Honoré Daumier and Thomas Rowlandson in her depictions of highly detailed social realism scenes and illustrative political commentary, mostly within her smaller prints, drawings and sketches.
Due to her proximity to many other trained artists in New York at the time, along with her successful mastery of memory painting, Sarah is sometimes thought of as an Ashcan School disciple rather than the much deeper, imaginative Naïve artist she was. Although numerous mid life works of Berman's may resemble those of highly trained 20th century social realists like Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, or Raphael Soyer, her greatest works are those that showcase the different, innocent human fantasy she was capable of articulating. Even with these notable comparisons and success in showing her work, Berman chose to never sell a piece of art, as her creations came from an intensely personal place driven by her “untrammelled imagination”, as Henry McBride described in 1932.
Sarah Berman was born Sasha Ostrovsky, the second of six children and only daughter in a Jewish household in Romny, Ukraine. Her family suffered violent religious persecution during the Russian Pogroms of 1905, with Sasha discovering the dismembered body of her uncle after the wave of violence had passed through their town. She fled to the US at age 12, first to Philadelphia before moving to New York City two years later. There, she married the Yiddish poet Leivi Berman in 1919. They had no children, where they lived in her studio in the tenements on the Lower East Side and later at Union Square, where she died.
Sarah's career was extensive. Her works are best known for capturing the Naïve human fantasy she dreamt of while also depicting “primitive" New York centric social realism scenes. Her work ranges from 1912 through 1957, from the tenement life of the Lower East Side and around her lifelong studio on Union Square, to Harlem. She had been close personal friends with Raphael and Moses Soyer, often painting together in each other’s studios while garnering enthusiastic support to develop her primitive style, rather than follow their conventional process. She carried close working associations with a handful of other artists of the time, but mostly kept to herself and her passion.
Berman's self-taught range was much wider than the etchings and lithographs that on first glance define her. In some cases it includes detailed watercolors and drawings depicting Harlem’s African American culture, while different selections of large oil on canvas work depict her Chagall-esque early folkloric memories of illusory and spiritual Jewish life in Ukraine. Other paintings evoke a similar perspective on social realism cityscapes. There are more portraits, still life, and other paintings based upon her strong and long-standing ethereal connection with the artist Henri Rousseau, with whom she dreamt of having a direct association and who influenced her fantastical life paintings throughout her career.
While she did exhibit her wide range of paintings on countless occasions throughout the first half of the 20th century, by the time she died in 1957 she remained on the fringes of the modern art world that developed away from her. Sarah’s works remained untouched in her Union Square studio for over 20 years, exactly as they had been at the time of her death, while her husband Leivi struggled to keep them safe. Between 1978 and 1984, her oeuvre of some 300 oil paintings and thousands of drawings and prints were packed up, moved and entombed behind a series of fake walls in the attic of her niece’s house on Long Island. Despite her well received primitive style and lengthy list of works in notable collections across America, as trends shifted away from her Naive aesthetic, Sarah was left un-classed and brushed aside. From 1960 onward Berman's career would stay dormant, where it remained mostly hidden until her body of work was re-discovered behind those fake walls within the family's house in 2012.
Sarah Berman has been described as an “Outsider’s Outsider”, a self-taught artist whose work crosses between a transformative Naïve Social Realist and Folk artist traditions.
Career
Sweatshop years (1912–1918)
Artistic development Sarah Berman settled into the tenements of NYC's Lower East Side, working as a seamstress in the harsh environment of garment sweatshops from 1912-1918. By the age of 16 and during these years, Berman overcame the severe conditions and trauma from her tragic early years and began pursuing her determined interest in creating artwork.
Inspired by the various textile designs, styles and methods she would work with in the sweatshops and at the earliest stage of her career, Sarah developed a distinctive artistic style, aiming to create a vision of the life she lived. At this time, she was living in impoverished conditions. She was affected by the same conditions she painted in her earliest Naive social scenes.
Sarah Berman had little money for art supplies, she collected whatever materials she could find and the majority of her earliest works through this period were completed on brittle and vulnerable paper, or cardboard. These works evoke deep visual ties to the hallmarks of self taught naïveté, bordering on Art Brut and acutely falling into what would later be considered as "Outsider Art", long after her death.
The characteristics of naïve art have an awkward relationship to the formal qualities of painting, especially not respecting the three rules of the perspective (such as defined by the Progressive Painters of the Renaissance): Decrease of the size of objects proportionally with distance, Muting of colors with distance, Decrease of the precision of details with distance, The results are: Effects of perspective geometrically erroneous (awkward aspect of the works, children's drawings look, or medieval painting look, but the comparison stops there) Strong use of pattern, unrefined color on all the plans of the composition, without enfeeblement in the background, An equal accuracy brought to details, including those of the background which should be shaded off. Sarah struggled to survive as a young single female immigrant who barely spoke English, while toiling daily as a seamstress in sweatshops. During this time and while she was becoming more comfortable with pencil and paper, she took one night class at the Modern School of the Ferrer Center in Harlem in 1915 with Robert Henri. This brief life drawing lesson was the only instruction that Sarah ever obtained. She received little formal technical instruction beyond this simplistic life drawing process, what resonated with her was the concept of "Memory Painting". This simple idea opened a world for her and led Berman to approach her work with this method.
Political influences Aside from pursuing her autodidactic development in artwork, Sarah Berman became a keen follower of Clara Lemlich Shavelson, "the young firebrand whose impassioned Yiddish speech set off the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, the largest strike by women workers in the United States to that time. It galvanized the fledgling International Ladies Garment Workers Union and set off a wave of women’s strikes between 1909 and 1915 that spread from New York to Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Iowa, and Kalamazoo, Michigan." "But it also set the stage for tragedy when union negotiators failed to advance the young women’s demand for safer working conditions. That lapse would come back to haunt the union on March 25, 1911, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City killed 146 workers, mostly immigrant Jewish and Italian women."
Sarah Berman had just moved from Philadelphia to New York and was influenced by the Lemlich's leadership. Between 1911 and 1916, Sarah would frequently engage with many of her female peers within the sweatshops she worked in. They would develop their attention for activism in all things social justice, pursuing the ideals of socialism and setting the stage for the next phase of what was to come in Berman's life.
The Tea Room years (1918–1920)
Political development As the decade was coming to an end, Sarah's creative pursuits took a backseat as the political landscape around her began to shift dynamically. In 1918 Sarah moved beyond her sweatshop career and embarked on starting a new business as the founder and operator of the “Tea Room” in the building which housed Manhattan’s Rand School, with its connections to the Socialist Party of America. Although she did not produce much artwork during this short period of running the cafe, she was highly active in the rising socialist movement surrounding her.
In the summer of 1919, the Rand School became embroiled in a series of violent civilian mob incidents and further police raids by the Bureau of Investigation. Just weeks after J. Edgar Hoover became the head of the newly minted General Intelligence Division, Berman came face to face with officers from his "Radical Division" as they raided her Tea-Room along with the school in one of the incidents. She watched as many of her cohorts were violently beaten, some taken away into custody. All business records and monies were taken along with some of Berman's personal documents. Berman became a potential suspect by proxy and she was watched for her perceived connection to the ongoing investigations surrounding the Socialist Movement and the Radicals.
These events had a profound effect on Sarah, adding to the cumulative trauma she endured from the political, religious and idealistic persecution in her early life in Ukraine. She witnessed a number of her close friends and associates get scooped up in the raids and ultimately face severe prosecution within the Lusk Committee investigations. Some were even deported. From this point on, Sarah shied away from public acknowledgement with the socialist party, preferring to dither into the further fringes of tenement society. She would carry this trauma throughout her life, it ultimately being a root cause for her to remain otherwise reclusive during the heights of her art career.
Artistic influence