Ann Chernow (née Levy; born February 1, 1936) is an American artist who is known for her portrait-style illustrations that evoke the images of female cinematic figures of the 1930s and 1940s.
[1] In most of her works, however, Chernow avoids specificity, choosing instead to portray universal situations through figures who are inspired by film but reinterpreted to transcend stereotypes.
[7] Her mother was an amateur singer and her father was a performing violinist, so she and her sisters received music and art lessons as children; Ann began at the age of five.
Her instructors and mentors included Howard Conant, Jules Olitski, Irving Sandler, Lawrence Alloway and Hale Woodruff, all of whom influenced her through their teachings and artistic viewpoints.
[5] She reached the height of her career with a number of evocative paintings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which depicted starlets of the 1930s and 1940s, as in Artist and Models (1998).
[9] Chernow aims to reveal the "unsentimental truth" in her art by showing an image that jogs a memory and brings about a nostalgia which her viewers can understand because they see something familiar.