Metropolis Movement
(also exhibited as New York of Yesterday), 1939
Beys Afroyim (1893 -1984)
Oil on canvas, 94 1/4 X 55 1/2
Signed lower right: Afroyim / 1939
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Jerome Krant in memory of Rebecca Krant Afroyim, 94.60

 

In his arresting cutaway view of 1939 midtown Manhattan, Beys Afroyim has represented three levels of urban transit: the underground subway, street-level vehicular traffic, and elevated railway tracks. As backdrop to this multi-level drama of diagonals, he has employed the contrasting verticality of New York's skyscrapers, the most recognizable being the recently opened Empire State Building. Hard-edged geometric shapes in muted colors crisscross the canvas, conveying the solidity and immensity of New York's burgeoning steel and concrete infrastructure. Work of this sort earned Afroyim the label "radical modernist."

Afroyim, born Ephraim Bernstein in Riki, Poland, immigrated to the United States in 1912 and became a naturalized citizen in 1926.¹ He studied at the Chicago Art Institute and at the National Academy of Design with Charles Hinton and had his first one-man show at the Jewish Institute in New York in 1922. That same year, Alfred Steiglitz maneuvered Afroyim's inclusion in the first annual exhibition of the forward-looking Society of Independent Artists. Metropolis Movement was exhibited at the society's Silver Jubilee. In 1927 Afroyim opened the Afroyim Experimental School of Art in New York City.

Afroyim subsequently worked and exhibited in Europe, Cuba, and Mexico, returning to New York in the 1930s to participate in various WPA-era art projects. His work includes portraits of noted politicians and literary and artistic figures, sculptural reliefs in copper, and artistic responses to symphonies and other compositions, called "visual music."² In 1950 he established a studio in the Israeli art colony of Safad, and until his death he divided his time between Israel and his residence on Staten Island.

Notes:

1  Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1985), p. 6. Afroyim lost his citizenship when he was believed to have voted in Israeli elections while living there during the 1950s, a violation of the Immigration and Naturalization Act. In 1967 he won a landmark Supreme Court case, which hinged on his ability to convince the Court that he had never voted in Israel, and regained his U.S. citizenship.

  2  Michael E. Quint, in "Artist Paints Symphonies," Staten Island Sunday Advance, April 4, 1971, writes that Arnold Schoenberg was so taken with Afroyim's "visual music" paintings that he asked to have two of them hung in his music studio as a source for discussion with his students.