Red Wall II
1978
Philip Reisman (1904 -1992)
Oil on canvas, 26 X 40
Signed lower left: Philip Reisman 1978
Gift of Mrs. Louise K. Reisman, 80.7

 

Philip Reisman, the Polish-born son of immigrants, discovered art in his early teens. His interest matured through etching and drawing courses he attended at the Art Students League while supporting himself as a soda fountain clerk and at other odd jobs.¹ Whereas he would eventually achieve wide recognition as a printmaker, book illustrator, and art instructor, by the 1920s Reisman was also immersed in painting New York City's teeming streets. Technically self-taught in that pursuit, he was guided by the Ash Can School's endorsement of modern urban truths as fit subjects for canvas and took inspiration from the city scenes of John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, both influential teachers at the league during Reisman's term of study there. In the 1930s his growing confidence as an artist, bolstered by a 1932 show at the Painters and Sculptors Gallery on East 11th Street and a fellowship at the Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga, New York, in 1933 -1934, overlapped with the advent of Social Realism, which motivated Reisman's political awareness as a painter.² In the same period, the WPA's Federal Art Project presented opportunities for the artist to apply his skills to various easel and mural projects (including a now-destroyed mural for the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital) and to travel through the American South while compiling a visual record of its indigenous architecture.

Reisman entered the 1940s with an enlarged social conscience and an empathy for the human condition. This Depression-bred sensibility informed the cityscapes he would paint for a half-century thereafter: scenes presented in an accessible style that privileged the "ordinary" in urban life, usually with a mixture of humor and compassion. He professed to eschew models or photographs, preferring to work like a draftsman "from observation and sketches, relying much on memory."³

Red Wall II, depicting the sidewalk activity along a stretch of Avenue B, is characteristic of Reisman's nimble brushwork and his probing but not pessimistic impressions of New York's grittier enclaves. The painting's title reflects his aesthetic concern with the urban landscape's structural components. Here, as in many of his paintings, Reisman sharply observes the timeworn facades of tenement dwellings, with their zigzagging fire escapes; a rooftop assemblage of utility shed, laundry lines, and television antenna; an expanse of blue-tinged pavement marred with cracks; the nondescript entrance to a corner convenience store. The horizontal wall, with ghost-like graffiti markings, injects a shock of color into the setting's otherwise drab palette, while functioning as a compositional device to interconnect the disparate foreground elements of the picture: a derelict automobile, an open hydrant, assorted vignettes of social exchange, and the layered rows of buildings in the receding visual planes.

For Reisman, however, the nuances of New York's built environment were less important than the parade of civilians native to it, with the casts of characters ranging from pre-World War II Bowery bums to post-Vietnam punk rockers in the East Village.⁴ Here, Reisman has mustered a collection of Lower East Side denizens from the late 1970s. At far right, a man in beret and bell bottoms drifts away from some cronies loitering outside the corner store. Moving left, an interracial threesome chats as a dog strains at its leash. Beyond, an addict sprawled on the sidewalk seems to panhandle a person confronting him. Several other pedestrians have proceeded past him, one carrying groceries, another, with a child, pushing what appears to be a stroller out of the picture's left edge. Two men continue their business with the car at curbside, although it is uncertain whether they are fixing it or looting it. All seem oblivious to the quotidian sights of a flowing hydrant and debris-strewn street just beyond.

From a studio just off Union Square and, subsequently, another one on the square, Reisman conducted a productive later career. He remained active as an art teacher at the Educational Alliance, served the governance of Artists' Equity Association in several different capacities, and introduced a younger generation of critics and museum goers to his urban-scene paintings of New York with The Sixties and the Seventies, a special exhibition mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in 1979. In honor of that show, Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein proclaimed November 13, 1979, "Philip Reisman Day" to recognize the artist for his distinguished contributions to the city.⁵

Notes:

  1  In a 1982 interview Reisman recalled that his early fascination was kindled by an art correspondence course that his eldest brother took in 1914. A constant "doodler," Reisman dropped out of high school for a job in an art service that promised to teach him illustration but in fact taught him "how to run errands and wrap packages." His career as an illustrator advanced quickly, however. By the late 1920s he had sold etchings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, completed an assignment for Collier's magazine, and had exhibited his drawings and prints in a number of gallery and museum venues. The artist's reminiscences are quoted in Sandra Durell, "The Artist in Society: An Interview with Philip Reisman, N.A." (December 1982), in Philip Reisman: A Life Remembered, 1904 -1992 (New York: privately printed by Louise K. Reisman, 1993), pp. 29 -34.

  2  During the early 1930s Reisman was also active in the John Reed Club, and, later, in the Artists' Union and the American Artists' Congress. See Patricia Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism: American Paintings of the 1930s (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1983), pp. 76 -77.

  3  Philip Reisman, quoted in the exhibition catalogue The Sixties and the Seventies: Paintings of New York City by Philip Reisman (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1980), p. 2.

  4  The Museum owns two other oil paintings by Reisman that evoke "types" seen around the city in particular eras: The Sleeper, 1966 (acc. no. 92.71), depicting a street bum dozing on a bench, is a reminder of New York's tenacious homeless population, and Games, 1985 (see fig. 9), records some exuberant sidewalk "break dancers" and a gaming arcade employee wearing an "I Love New York" T-shirt.

  5  Reisman's career is extensively documented in articles, entries in artist dictionaries, and obituary notices in the Museum Archives. For many years, he exhibited at the ACA Gallery in Manhattan with other artists who made use of social commentary, and copies of these associated catalogues contain useful information. For selective summaries of his later career, see, for example, Raymond J. Steiner, "Profile on: Philip Resiman," Art Times (April 1985): 8 -9; and Patricia Van Gelder, "Philip Reisman: Manhattan Chronicles," American Artist 43 (October 1979): 68 -73, 114 -115.