Burton Silverman

Born in Brooklyn New York, 1928, Burton Silverman received a BA from Columbia College and studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League, the National Academy School of Fine Arts, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, the Brigham Young School of Fine Arts and was Smith Distinguished Visiting Professor at the George Washington University in Washington DC.

Important exhibitions of Silerman's work include retrospectives at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Brigham Young Museum of Art, and the Sherwin Miller Museum, Tulsa OK, and the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts University and the Hofstra University Museum; also group exhibits at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Delaware Art Museum, the Arnot Art Museum and numerous solo shows at Gallery Henoch NY and Haynes galleries, TN. His work is represented in numerous public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Butler Institute of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, The Georgia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum, the Mint Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum , the Columbus Museum, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Arkansas Art Center, the Seven Bridges Foundation, CT, and the Smith Museum of Auburn University.

Now entering his sixth decade as an artist, Burton Silverman is one of America’s most accomplished and important painters. ……. He is rightly called a “painter’s painter” by his peers. The title suits him. He remains focused on what is true and universal about art. It is not a matter of style or genre, realism vs. abstraction - many artists today[1] paint realistically - rather, of quality and intelligence. In terms of craft, draftsmanship, brushwork, composition, color, tonality, line, form - the formal, “painterly” aesthetic qualities one identifies with the legacy of the past - Silverman holds his own with the great artists who inspired him.[2] Indeed, it is this inner toughness, a ruthless aesthetic sensibility that sustains Silverman, and to which he returns again and again for inspiration and guidance[3] “In my life’s work,” says Silverman, “I have tried to reunite form (color and composition) with content (realistic and narrative imagery) to arrive at some kind of synthesis of 20th-century formalism with 20th-century sensibilities. I do not believe that the way paint is applied {to a canvass}should be more important than what is portrayed." For the next 35 years he pursued a dual career[4] as a gallery artist and illustrator, that led to his election to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2001. In this period[5] his album cover portrait of Aqualung for the rock group Jethro Tull became an iconic image that has lasted over 50 years and is still celebrated today[6] Abandoning illustration in 1992, he pursued painting goals that defied governing Modernist aesthetics "In view of the many honors he has been accorded, it may seem odd to describe Burton Silverman (b. 1928) as an artistic underdog, yet the designation actually fits. Unlike his exact contemporary, the abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, Silverman is neither world famous nor rich. This situation says less about the immense talents of these two men than it does about the state of American art in the 20th century.[7] “His art may be seen as a kind of radical realism by virtue of it’s continuing devotion to a humanist vision that has survived modernist dogma of the fifties as well as the austere impersonal canons of judgment embedded in the “new realism” of the eighties….For Silverman form remains inextricably linked to meaning. Asserting itself throughout his painting is the fluid brushwork and natural coloration that informs the eye while eliciting, alchemically, a compassionate understanding of the human condition. In the final analysis, it is Silverman’s unflinching vision together with his creative rethinking of tradition, that constitutes his most defiant and enduring artistic contribution.”[8]

The political and philosophical world of the 1950s was one of repression and fear. In this environment, Silverman traveled with fellow artist Harvey Dinnerstein to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 to document the profound social change taking place when the black population refused to ride segregated buses in the capital of Alabama. The drawings they created there were a dramatic reconstruction of this turning point in American culture. First shown in 2005 at the Delaware Art Museum in an exhibition called in "In Glorious Dignity: Drawings of the Montgomery Bus Boycott" the exhibition then was shown at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art in 2006. The exhibition catalog describes this event: “they traveled … to document through their drawings, ordinary people engaged in a mighty endeavor, a demonstration of civil disobedience which came to be known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Soon what began as a local phenomenon received widespread national and international attention, serving as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement." The boycott, according to the artists, was "a struggle that went beyond specific issues of segregation in the buses, to larger concerns of inequality across the nation." During their visit Dinnerstein and Silverman created more than 90 drawings ranging from courtroom scenes to church meetings to portraits of those who chose according to the Rev. Martin Luther King, to "walk with dignity rather than ride in humiliation."[9]

He is the recipient of nine awards from the National Academy of Design Museum including two Henry W. Ranger Purchase Awards. He was awarded a Gold medal from the Portrait Society of America 2004, the Annual Distinguished Artist Award from the Newington Cropsey Cultural Foundation, The John Singer Sargent Gold Medal from American Society of Portrait Artist, 2002, Lifetime Achievement Award The FACE Conference,2018 and an Honorary Doctorate from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, 2001.[10]

• Burton Silverman, "Getting to Realism from Two Directions" The Artist's Magazine, August 1992
• Burton Silverman, "What makes Art Great" American Arts Quarterly, Spring 1992
• Burton Silverman, "Homage to Eakins" Book World, December 1967
• Burton Silverman, "Art for Pablo Picasso's Sake" Book World, June 1968

• Maureen Bloomfield, "In Context; an interview with Burton Silverman”, The Artist's Magazine, May 2015
• Maureen Bloomfield, " Masters and Mentors" New Realism,2016
• Michael Gormley, “Face It; Talking about Portraiture with Burton Silverman” Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, Nov.Dec.2014
• Austin Williams," 7 Influential Teachers of Our Time", American Artist Dec.2012
• Michael Gormley "Three Painters Visualize the Real World”, American Artist, Feb.2012
• John O’Hern “Everyday People”, American Art Review, Dec. 2011
• Adam Van Doren. "Realism Redux", American Artist, October 2011
• Ira Goldberg, "In search of the Humane” Linea Magazine of the Art Student’s League, Fall, 2011
• Naomi Esperigin "What Is Genuine?: Realist Artists Take on “Hard Times” American Artist Magazine, 2010
• Tracy Fieldstat " When Artists take on the Hard Times”, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Feb 2010
• Karen York, "Realism Recovered: The Art of Burton Silverman" 2010(Exhibition Catalog)
• Matthias Alexander," Burton Silverman; Sight and Insight” Fine Arts Connoisseur Mar. Apr. 2007
• Herman Dutoit, “The Intimate Eye, The Drawings of Burton Silverman, Brigham Young University, 2006
• Mark M Johnson, "Protest in Montgomery" Montgomery Museum of Art, AL. Introd.to the catalog, 2006
• Joseph Keiffer, “Burton Silverman” American Arts Quarterly Spring, 1999
• Michael Ward, "Letter From a Guest" The Artist's Magazine, 1991
• Steven Heller, Review, ARTS magazine, January 1984.
• Charles Offin, "Burton Silverman at Far" Arts Magazine, May 1970
• Brian O'Doherty, "Art: A Return to Old Masters' World" The New York Times, February 2, 1962

• Naked: The Nude in America, Dykstra, Bram 2010
• The Intimate Eye, the Drawings of Burton Silverman, Brigham Young University Press, 2006, Herman Dutoit, curator, 2006, ISBN 0-8425-2645-5
• The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000 The Society of Illustrators, Walt Read 2001 ISBN 0-8230-2523-3
• Sight and Insight, the Art of Burton Silverman, Madison Square Press, NY 1999. Essays by John McGrath, Philip Saietta and Burton Silverman Preface by Campbell Gray, Director BYU Museum. Foreword by Louis Zona, Dir, Butler Institute of American Art, ISBN 0-942604-68-7
• Painting People, Burton Silverman, Watson Guptill, 1977 ISBN 0-8230-3815-7
• Breaking the Rules of Watercolor, Burton Silverman. Watson Guptill, NY.1981 ISBN 0-942604-68-7

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8M_bxCuUFQ&list=PLVCLsZ8CpgQ_AyxWJWSJ2WK6RY2jz88Ax&index=2
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJzHNMqxS90

• Official website