Jerome Myers - Art Digest Magazine - July 1, 1940 - Jerome Myers Passes

Jerome Myers Passes

“American Art has lost one of it finest, most individual figures with the death on June 19 of Jerome Myers. For more than 50 years Myers, small of stature and bearing a striking resemblance to Paderewski, was a familiar sight on the streets of New York, which he made his special painting province.

The lower East Side, with its crowded tenements and struggling immigrants, knew him best and was recorded in hundreds of sketches which were later transcribed onto soft-toned canvases. The poor seems to bring forth Myers’ deepest feelings, but he did not paint them because they and their environment were ugly; he saw the beauty of their humble lives, and on his canvases he has caught that beauty...During those 50 years the cobblestones that Myers used to tramp were smoothed to asphalt pavements, the city’s center of activity crept northward leaving in its wake new, pristine skyscrapers; gas lamps gave way to neon, but the poor remained.

Though Myers later achieved wide honors—he was elected to the Academy and awarded such important prizes as the Altman, the Carnegie and the Isidor Medal—he suffered from neglect in recent years. Forgotten, for the most part, were Myers’ distinctive contributions to our native art and the battles he has fought for art freedom...Last year, as the end neared, Myers looked back on a long and fruitful life and wrote a most interesting autobiography, Artist in Manhattan (American Artists Group; New York).”