The intrinsic value of art has long been recognized by the people of Wisconsin, starting in 1888 when Frederick Layton built the first permanent art gallery in Milwaukee.
Wisconsin’s Jewish community has been central to the establishment of some of the state’s most important institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Ironically, however, the country’s greatest fiscal disaster provided local artists with the means to take risks and to experiment in their art.
During the Great Depression, the federal government became the country’s greatest supporter of the arts. The primary motive for programs like the Federal Art Project, under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration, was to create jobs for artists and to enhance buildings built and maintained with tax money.
Some of the region’s most influential artists and educators might not have dedicated their life’s work to the visual arts if not for the WPA.
Joseph Friebert was born in 1908 in Buffalo, N.Y., and his family moved to Milwaukee in 1911. Friebert grew up in a Jewish working-class family where his father was a tailor and union organizer.
After high school, Friebert earned pharmacist certification from Marquette University and worked for the Oriental Pharmacy in Milwaukee. Because of his income, he did not qualify to be a WPA artist, but he joined the Businessman’s Art Club in 1932, a group of “Sunday painters.”
Local artists pooled their resources to rent studio space on Milwaukee’s Third Street. There Friebert, guided by the city’s most important artists, transformed from a pharmacist who dabbled in sketching into a distinguished painter and teacher.
In addition to his land- and cityscapes, Friebert was drawn to social issues — racism, poverty, and refugees.
He started exhibiting his work in 1935, but did not abandon pharmacy until he joined the faculty of Milwaukee’s Layton Art School in 1945. In that same year he graduated from Milwaukee State Teacher’s College (now UW-Milwaukee) and joined its faculty in 1946 where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1976.
Friebert’s style was often described as “Old World,” similar to Rembrandt and other Dutch painters. Later, he was influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, and his art became more ordered and abstract.
Abstract painting came to Wisconsin through the work of Milwaukeean Fred Berman.
There was a time in American art history when you could look at a canvas and accurately predict where the artist lived: Californians painted mountains and Wisconsin artists painted barns.
The movement was known as Regionalism, and it dominated Midwestern art long after the rest of the world embraced abstract expressionism.
Over his lifetime, Berman worked in a variety of media, but by the middle of the 1950s, his “White Cities” series of paintings had moved to pure abstraction, out of synch with regionalist canons.
Berman was barely 29 when he was invited to the 1956 Venice Biennale along with artists like Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning. Only Ivan Albright, Friebert and Berman were selected to represent the Midwest.
Aaron Bohrod studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1926 and the Art Students League of New York under John Sloan.
Sloan was one of the leaders of the Ashcan School, a group of artists who depicted life in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Bohrod was determined to do for Chicago what Sloan had done for New York.
Bohrod’s depictions of desolate streets and people of the Depression era earned him a reputation as one of the finest painters in America by the 1940s.
In 1948, Bohrod accepted a position as artist-in-residence at UW-Madison. He toured the state and neighboring Michigan, meeting other artists, giving critiques and offering advice.
In the late 1940s Bohrod experimented with illusionism and fantasy in a trend called “Magic Realism” and later with trompe l’oeil — highly decorative and detailed still life paintings.
Also present in those Third Street studios was Alfred Sessler, one of the most prolific lithographers and muralists under the WPA. A native of Milwaukee, Sessler was pivotal in the establishment of the printmaking program at UW-Madison.
Sessler’s Jewish Hungarian immigrant parents encouraged him to sketch and draw from an early age, and his talents were cultivated through classes at the Layton School of Art.
He later graduated from the Milwaukee State Teachers College in 1944, earned his Master of Arts degree from UW-Madison in 1945 and joined its art faculty, a position he held until his death in 1963.
Sessler’s work addressed themes of social and racial injustice, the struggle of unions, and the divide between labor and capital.
He was committed to the belief that art should be available to everyone, not only a privileged few. His chosen medium of prints could be produced in greater number and at less cost than canvas paintings and therefore became accessible to a greater number of people.
In the 1940s, Sessler began experimenting with color woodcuts. In traditional color printing, a separate wood block must be used for each color. The master block containing the complete image is split into as many additional blocks as necessary.
In the 1950s, Sessler developed a method in which only one block was employed. His color reduction woodcut, “Still Life—The Vase” (1957), predates Pablo Picasso’s color reductions by at least a year.
Although cities like Paris and New York are associated as the vanguard of the art world, it would be a disservice to overlook the contributions of Jewish artists whose works and imaginative techniques influenced not only the Midwestern art scene, but who also challenged and provoked the international art world.
Whether it be Friebert and Berman’s introduction of abstract expressionism into a Regionalist-dominated Midwest, Bohrod’s rediscovery of still-life art for his generation, or Sessler’s lithographs and innovative “reduction block” method, Wisconsin’s 20th century Jewish artists made their mark as true founders and visionaries.
Learn more about these artists and their work at the exhibit “Founders & Visionaries: Wisconsin Jewish Artists from the Milwaukee Art Museum,” now on display at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee through May 31.
Elizabeth M. Matelski, Ph.D, teaches in the English department at Carroll University in Waukesha and is an exhibit researcher for the Jewish Museum Milwaukee.
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