Jerome Myers - Quotations From Newspaper Reviews and Articles

Quotations From Newspaper Reviews and Articles

• One may know the great east side fairly well, and yet it is a revelation to walk through it with so close a student of its life and its people as Mr. Myers has become. - NY Times – 6-1-1906 – (Life on the East Side His Art Inspiration)

• Let us recognize that the work of Sloan and a few others, such as Robert Henri, C.W. Hawthorne, William G. Glackens, Jerome Myers, and George Luks, is a natural and wholesome reaction from the vogue of frippery, tameness, and sentimentality. - 1907 (Story of American Painting in America) – Charles Henry Caffin

• The broad, free handling is that of a painter of more than technical powers. Mr. Myers must be reckoned among the mean of today and of many tomorrows in American Art. – Unidentified newspaper 1908

• Twenty-five canvases by Jerome Myers, were placed on exhibition yesterday in the Macbeth Galleries. Those who know their New York well will appreciate these graphic and truthful representations. – New York Herald – 1-5-1908 (Myers one-man show at Macbeth)

• The poor we have always with us, but not always in the guise presented in the paintings by Jerome Myers, now being shown at the Macbeth Gallery, 450 Fifth Avenue. These are records of life on the east side and in out-of-the-way corners of the town that but few of us are familiar with. – NY Times 1-7-1908 (Myers one-man show at Macbeth)

• Nearly all of the examples picture existence by day and by night as the East Side dweller sees it and feels it. With these people Mr. Myers has sympathy: hence, nearly all of his work lacks prettiness. Possibly not one would be considered favorably by an Academy committee, and yet in many of them there is not only a record, but fine art, with color, with tone, and with atmospheric effect that remind you of the minor works by old Italian painters. – Brooklyn Daily Eagle – 1-1-1908 (Myers one-man show at Macbeth)

• Here, in one month, we have Childe Hassam giving us a view of New York's outermost appearance that shows us what a fairyland it is in color and form, and Jerome Myers showing us how, even within the darker recesses, in full view of the sadder side of life itself, there is still beauty for the man with eyes to see. A group of drawings by Mr. Myers shows almost more certainly than the quality of his color the fineness of his grasp of his material. We are not likely to have this winter anything better in itself and more promising for development in the future than this exhibition. - The Independent (Art Magazine) - January 1908 (Myers one-man show at Macbeth)''

• Rembrandtesque would have been the epithet applied to some of these canvasses by the critics of an earlier generation. With all their apparent absence of variety they are, when closely studied, each after its style, very different. Many problems of atmosphere, clear and obscure and translucent, Myers has set himself to solve. Sometimes the effect of a street scene is that of a flat Pompeian mural decoration. Airless, the sharp snipped silhouettes of the children assume hieratic attitudes, yet they are vivaciously alive; it is not arrested motion as typified in a photograph. Street gossips meet. Bustle, animation, humor are before us in the life of the East Side. Sometimes as in a transparent breath, a summer night’s sultry envelope, men and women and children swim vaguely before our gaze. It is August and humid veils of steam descent upon the town. Blue black skies which show here and there a half smothered star; a bench at the end of an anonymous street. Upon a bench sit four or five of the disinherited of life. An old man’s reddish beard catches a gleam of light—the source is not shown; probably some remote lamp post; a woman props her head upon a skinny arm. There is despair in the pose. Two children in ambiguous whites are the highest notes in this subdued scale. Mystery, the mystery of Rembrandt, without his consoling magic, pervades “Evening On the East Side.”" - New York Sun, January 7, 1908 - James Gibbons Huneker (Myers one-man show at Macbeth)''

• Mr. Myers has above most of his contemporaries a keen appreciation of the drama of the city, and with his feeling for color at once chastened and heightened, his canvases would take their place in the front ranks of contemporary art. – NY Times – 12-1-1908

• His work is a valuable record of a side of life in this city which cannot but change completely in another score of years, and, moreover, it is art and art of a high character. – NY Times – 5-2-1909

• One need merely pass through Mulberry Street to know that childlike gaiety and even grace exist there and in other tenement quarters of the city. Mr. Myers has the happy turn of mind to see the dingy truth in all its dinginess and yet preserve the loveliness of color and tone that blooms never more flowerlike than among the picturesque byways swarming with the children of transplanted races. – NY Times – 5-9-1909

• Jerome Myers, who is represented by two admirable pictures, is so fully recognized as a master of his technique that one takes from him without comment work which is in an extremely high rank of expressive draughtsmanship. … At all events, this little picture of New York life (Night), tingling with character and actuality, yet conveying a sense of the monumental by the nobility of the composition and the large modeling of the forms, should it find its way into one of the great collections of the future, may be trusted to hold its own as representative of an extremely important phase of twentieth century painting. – NY Times – 10-31-1909

• With the three street subjects by Jerome Myers we swing into the composite life of the city and get the harsh and stirring note to which the great unconscious army of our new civilization marches. Apparently we are not to be a somber race, since above the misery of the east side rises the love of strong color and play. No one has done more than Mr. Myers to make us realize what the open spaces and organized pleasures of the city mean to the people at large, which is a matter apart from his art, but has the connection with it to be claimed for every subject to which appropriate artistic expression has been given. – NY Times – 1-15-1911

• Myers has a skill, but he has more than skill, he has sympathy that is boundless and a clairvoyant humor that is the highest truth. – The Evening Mail, NY – 4-4-1911

• But no one has recorded its accidents and incidents with so large and optimistic a sympathy; no one has shown its strange blossoms of exotic beauty with such natural and unpremeditated appreciation; no one has recorded its somber moments with such respect for their solemnity. His imagination acting upon his essentially vivid materials accentuates its vitality, so that in looking at his drawing we feel this little stage to be the real world and all the rest unreal. As a technician his most noteworthy success is in his use of line, and in America he has few rivals in this respect; but his reading of humanity raises him above the rank of mere technician to that of artist and poet. He does not simply illustrate, he illuminates his subject. – NY Times – 4-9-1911 (Madison Art Galleries Exhibition)

• As for Mr. Jerome Myers' paintings, each one in turn gave a sense of fresh apprehension of the extraordinary art of this man of simple quiet canvases. How well he understands city life, how beautifully he makes you see the joy in the hearts of his ragged little children, as well as the grief in the souls of the somber aged, was shown in his six paintings which really form a record of his insight into the realities of life and the beauties that are hidden deep in some seeming sad realities. – The Craftsman – January 1912 (MacDowell Club Exhibition)

• Jerome Myers for several years has been showing New Yorkers the artistic possibilities of what is perhaps the unique part of the city's scenes. He has discovered these subjects for himself and treats them in his own way. It is never the exciting moments of street life that move him, only the daily happenings, the usual things that all may see. Boys and girls playing in the square, the crowd at a recreation pier, an organ-grinder followed by a troop of dancing children, old people whom the night freshness lures to the park-bench or the wharf, a religious festival in Little Italy—these are his favorite themes and he renders them with loving sincerity and a profound appreciation of their significance. – Metropolitan Museum Bulletin – 6-5-1912 (on museum purchase of The Night Mission)

• There are other engaging pictures. In Pursuit of Pleasure, by Jerome Myers, a group of children following a hurdy gurdy, reminds one of the harmony between the picture by Mr. Myers and that by Whistler hung side by side at the Metropolitan Museum. – New York Times – May 31, 1914 (Summer exhibition at Macbeth Galleries)

• For the artist, for the humanitarian, for the lover of all truth about human nature these etchings of Jerome Myers are sure to bring a keener interest in and enlarged vision of beauty, a greater appreciation of the etching's line as a means of unfolding human life for us, and a finer understanding of humanity in its franker, simpler expression. – The Craftsman - October 1915 (Jerome Myers as an Etcher and Student of Human Nature - Gustav Stickley, Editor)

• But Myers does insist that whatever truth is presented by a realist shall be nothing but the truth. I remember his annoyance upon observing in a picture of the East Side a wash line suspended across the street. He had lived and worked in that district for thirty years and never had he seen such a thing. Yes, he has lived in the lower East Side for so long a time that it is home to him. He draws and etches and paints the life of the people there with such rare sympathy and insight because he has made himself one of them. ...But Myers has not always that smiling twinkle in his eye. There are moods of intense sadness in the man. So well does he know the human body (one would say with a physician's as well as with an artist's knowledge) that his sympathy is expressed in poignant lines. We know how the little boy feels as he swings high up over one of those dusty, dreary, necessary playgrounds, and we share the backache of the old man on the park bench, the pitiful comfort of the hard-seat after his painful walk. ' – Jerome Myers by Duncan Phillips – 1917 (Magazine of art, Volume 8 Page 481, American Federation of Arts)''