Sarai Sherman
Sarai Sherman (September 2, 1922 – October 24, 2013) was a Pennsylvania-born Jewish American artist whose work, both in America and Europe shaped international views of women and abstract expressionism.
Sherman studied at the prestigious Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania where she was exposed to seminal works of modern masters[2] and she attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, headed at the time by Russian-born artist Boris Blai with faculty including Earl Horter and Honga Holm.
She wrote from Matera in the Spring of 1953 "I feel at home...not because these caves remind me of Philadelphia, but because somehow a passage of light or color, or the motion of an animal, recall to my mind moments of my childhood, distant places.
This period is full of symbolic content, the tenderness, the thoughtfulness of her paintings, which often become the moment of completion of an experience instead of simply leading to the discovery of new worlds of characters.
The ever-changing spectacle offered by the streets, are elements which have entered her fantasy by force, obliging her to move in a humble effort towards an increased objectivity, but which in the same act of reduction emerge more autobiographical then ever.
A group of international women artists called the “Flood Ladies” donated work to the city as a sign of solidarity following the Arno's catastrophic damage.
As part of the 50th anniversary of the flooding, Sherman's work titled Icarus was one of 28 in a representative traveling exhibition and featured in the Book “When the World Answered” and the 2015 PBS documentary of the same name.
[8] Mario Penelope recalled in his 1983 essay on Sherman titled Coherence And Reality: "a group of paintings done during that first stay which were exhibited in nineteen hundred and fifty five in her first Roman one-person show at the Zodiac Gallery.
They seemed encamped with weighted solemmity in a timeless spatiality; in an understated drama of transcendent sadness which laid bare with bitter emotion the dark pathetic solitude of that sharecropper world.
The major recurring theme of an isolated urban solitude (expressed by an standardization of choices, in personal ideals and practical solutions, and hence the disappearance of feeling and communication) is not seen by this artist as a grievous meditation of the state of things where nothing can be achieved, as one sees in Edward Hopper’s revealing objectivism; nor is it an irascible accusation as in the post war II revival of expressionism.
In her painting (not only the earlier period from 1954 to 1965, but in all her developments) the characters do not rely upon indicative details, rather upon the “whole” with its resolute “aura” (inherent in such pictorialization of the thought imagery).
The projection of light in the painting in which every presence, every act seems to be caught in an equivocal transition between day and night or vice versa; in other words, in the inquietude and expectation of an unpredictable change.” [9] “In Sherman’s work there is a consistent involvement with a visualization of distorted values in the continuum of social generalization.
The capacity of Sherman to use the ambivalence inherent in metaphorical values, as a springboard in the employ of tonal color, immersed in diffused light has also made it possible to retain a sensitivity towards a younger generation’s milieu.
[10] Between 1987 and 1994 Sherman created major site-specific fresco and altarpiece commission in Cortona, Italy for the Guzzetti Chapel on the grounds of the Villa Corono.
