Philip Reisman, the Polish-born son of immigrants, discovered art in his early teens. His interest matured through etching and drawing courses he attended at the Art Students League while supporting himself as a soda fountain clerk and at other odd jobs. By the 1920s Reisman was immersed in painting New York City's teeming streets, taking inspiration from the earlier Ash Can-period city scenes of John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, both influential teachers at the league during Reisman's term of study there. In the 1930s his growing confidence as an artist, bolstered by a 1932 show at the Painters and Sculptors Gallery and a fellowship at the Yaddo Foundation in 1933 -1934, overlapped with the advent of Social Realism, which motivated Reisman's political awareness as a painter. In the same period, the WPA's Federal Art Project presented opportunities for the artist to apply his skills to various easel and mural projects, including a now-destroyed mural for the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, and to travel through the American South while compiling a visual record of its indigenous architecture.
Reisman entered the 1940s with an enlarged social conscience and an empathy for the human condition. This Depression-bred sensibility informed the cityscapes he would paint for a half-century thereafter: scenes presented in an accessible style that privileged the "ordinary" in urban life, usually with a mixture of humor and compassion. He professed to eschew models or photographs, preferring to work from observation. In 1944 he spent a summer in Massachusetts where he became fascinated with the Gloucester fishing industry, spending hours sketching scenes at a local mackerel processing plant. Reisman saw "a connection between the lives of men engaged in the struggle to make a living from the sea and those of city dwellers trying to survive in an often hostile environment." [William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, "Philip Reisman: Biography," Smithsonian Museum of Art website]
From a studio just off Union Square, Reisman conducted a productive career. He remained active as an art teacher at the Educational Alliance, served the governance of Artists' Equity Association in several different capacities, and introduced a younger generation of critics and museum goers to his urban-scene paintings of New York with "The Sixties and the Seventies", a special exhibition mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in 1979. In honor of that show, Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein proclaimed November 13, 1979, "Philip Reisman Day" to recognize the artist for his distinguished contributions to the city.
Reisman was a board member of the American Artists School, a member of the American Artists Congress, An American Group and the Artists League of America. His work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art, National Print Exhibition and the National Academy of Design, and is in the permanent collections of galleries and museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the City of New York and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.
Valley of the Dolls
Track Gang
Waiting Train
Collection at Harrys
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