The Strong Hand of a Realist

It’s a long way from a suffragette parade in 1916 to break dancers in 1984, but Theresa Bernstein has painted them both. In between, there have been thousands of other subjects. And at age 99 she is still at it.

Well-known in East Coast art circles, Bernstein’s work is making a West Coast debut in a show at the Platt Gallery at the University of Judaism, located on Mulholland Drive above the San Fernando Valley. The show offers a chance to see examples of a notable movement--Bernstein was one of the New York realist painters known as the Ashcan school--produced by a woman artist whose work was remarkably assertive for her time.

“Her touch is very strong and she’s enormously expressive, with great power,” said Patricia Burnham, a University of Texas art lecturer who has studied Bernstein. “She’s unlike her generation and unlike many modes of female expression. Women were supposed to express themselves in more gentle ways.”

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington has recognized Bernstein as one of the foremost women painters of her time.

Bernstein refuses to disclose her age. But Burnham said the 1900 census listed her as 9 years old. The artist, who lives in New York, visited Los Angeles last weekend. She is slightly built and gregarious. In an interview, she explained why she won’t discuss her age.

“People have the idea that you can’t be successful if you’re not young,” Bernstein said.

She insists on being taken seriously in part because she still paints. So strong is the impulse to work, in fact, that a recent bout with a gimpy arm didn’t stop her.

“If I couldn’t work with my right hand, I worked with my left hand even though I had no skill,” she said.

Bernstein’s works share the Platt Gallery exhibit with those of her late husband, William Meyerowitz, a painter, etcher and printmaker. The two had been married 62 years when he died in 1981. Meyerowitz is better known than his wife. More of his work hangs in prestigious museums, but Burnham said that may be changing.

“She has never been considered a major artist, but that was because we in America had a very, very narrow and condescending attitude toward the New York realists. We meant just the men. Now that New York realists are beginning to be discovered in all their diversity, Theresa stands tall.”

Like more famous Ashcan artists, John Sloan and Robert Henri among them, Bernstein often chose her subjects from everyday life.

“My paintings were of the scene, the environment where I lived,” she said.

She experimented with color and style, while keeping her work representational. Although her husband drifted toward abstractionism as it came into vogue, Bernstein did not. “I could never warm up to cubes and triangles,” Burnham quotes her as saying.

Often her works depict public places and crowds: the beach at Coney Island, a New York street going wild on Armistice Day, the public library, working-class people on a weekend boat outing. One of her better-known paintings is of a group of women waiting inside an employment office in 1917. Bernstein remembers doing a preliminary sketch, hiding her pad under a newspaper while she caught the mix of hope and despair on people’s faces.

“I’ve always been interested in people,” she said. “I’ve always been a curious observer.”

Educated in her native Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and the Philadelphia School of Design, Bernstein moved to New York in the early 1910s to attend the Art Students League and pursue her career. By the time she married Meyerowitz at the age of 29, she had endured a period a poverty and built a name for herself.

Because women were looked upon as second-class artists, she signed her paintings T. Bernstein or simply Bernstein. They met after her future husband saw one of her paintings at a show. A member of the People’s Art Guild, which gave artworks to those who couldn’t afford to buy them, he came to her studio asking for a donation.

“He told me, ‘Oh, I thought you were an older man,’ ” she remembered. Bernstein gave Meyerowitz several paintings, and their courtship started.

The show of Bernstein’s and Meyerowitz’s works is curated by Suzanne Stone, owner of Ashley Gallery in Sherman Oaks. After the Platt Gallery exhibit closes June 23, some of the works will move to Ashley Galley.

Stone said the couple were prolific, often painting side-by-side. Many finished canvases were taken off their stretcher bars and stored haphazardly so that the bars could be reused.

Bernstein said the reason for carelessness is simple.

“I’ve always had the impulse to express myself,” she explained.