phD (candidate) Dissertation Topic: Giacometti, studied under Meyer Schapiro, Columbia University Jonathan Silver (November 19, 1937 – July 10, 1992) was an American figurative sculptor, and visual artist "known for infusing classical forms with an extreme, implicitly modern sense of emotion.
A Byzantine or Egyptian head holds movement in the face and eyes, which has the effect of freezing the viewer in place.
He was fascinated by meditations on Hellenistic and Jewish culture, and from Thorleif Boman's "Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek," he absorbed the idea that for Jews, the static is always active and dynamic.
In his attempt to explore mire deeply the reasons for the intense responses to frontality over the centuries, he studied the Rorschach test, whose symmetrically around a central vertical line is essential to its ability to set the unconscious in motion.
Silver came to believe that exploring frontality could lead him into repressed areas where well-springs of anxiety, sexuality, insight and creativity lie.
Meyer Schapiro was impressed by Silver’s intellectual prowess and supported his dissertation on Giacometti at Columbia.
At the time of his death, he was teaching at both Montclair State College in New Jersey, where he had been an assistant professor of fine arts since 1970, and the New York Studio School.
"His attempt during the last 10 years to make his sculpture fully three-dimensional and alive from multiple points of view without losing its commanding presence – was heroic and more complex emotionally and intellectually than I can understand now.
Brenson is quoted reviewing a sculpture at the Queens Museum show "The Expressionist Surface" in 1990, saying "Jonathan Silver's Subway is a large underground chamber that is both violently animated (with severed limbs and heads and a silvery female figure being sacrificed to subway tracks) and frozen still by the introspection of a seated woman looking for herself in a mirror.