American Jewish artist Bernard Perlin is best-known for his work creating iconic images to support the war effort during World War II. But he also faced discrimination: An artist for the military and later a war correspondent during World War II, he was not allowed to serve himself because he was openly gay.
After the war, he became a prominent painter. In 1948, he created his most famous painting, Orthodox Boys, which features two religious Jewish boys in front of a graffiti wall in New York City.
Born in 1918 to Russian Jewish immigrants in Virginia, Perlin died in 2014 at the age of 95.
Starting in late September, Perlin’s work will be featured at Jewish Museum Milwaukee in an original curated exhibit called “Against the Grain: The Remarkable Life of Artist Bernard Perlin.” The exhibit will run from Sept. 27 through Jan. 26 of next year, and a preview will take place on Sept. 26.
“As a stylistically varied artist, Bernard Perlin’s work was featured on highly recognizable posters published by the Office of War Information during WWII, within the pages of Life, and on the covers of Harper’s and Fortune magazines,” said Molly Dubin, the chief curator of Milwaukee Jewish Museum.
“It can be found in the collections of prestigious museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite these achievements and a life’s journey filled with riveting experiences, Perlin is relatively unknown.”
The art comes directly from Perlin’s estate and elsewhere. Michael Schreiber is curator of the estate, while Dubin curated the exhibit.
“A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the curator of the Bernard
Perlin Estate,” Dubin said. “Based in Chicago, Michael Schreiber stewards the contents of Perlin’s collection and champions his story.”
While he had no known direct ties to Wisconsin, Perlin was, Dubin pointed out, Jewish, gay, and otherwise an outsider, which she described as “the lens through which he viewed and navigated the world.”
With the Democratic National Convention once again in Chicago and surrounded by protesters, Perlin is well-remembered for a 1968 painting called “Mayor Daley.” The painting features the large visage of then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, surrounded by picketing antiwar protesters and supporters of candidates Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy during that year’s convention.
When he died in 2014, the New York Times obituary described Perlin as “an American painter who displayed a mastery of light and line across seven decades and a wide range of work, including wartime propaganda posters, street scenes of New York and effervescent views of Italy.”
“The more I got to know about this individual – a gifted painter, illustrator, and war
correspondent who tackled the horrors of WWII, issues of social justice, and
homosexuality with conviction and bravery – the clearer it became that others should
know about him too,” Dubin said. “It has been exciting and rewarding to curate an exhibit which celebrates and brings deserved visibility to a man who lived his life passionately and unapologetically against the grain.”
At Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the exhibit follows “Chagall’s Dead Souls: A Satirical Account of Imperialist Russia,” which runs through Sept. 8.
In print in September, this article incorrectly named the curator of the exhibit. Molly Dubin, chief curator of Jewish Museum Milwaukee, curated the exhibit. The article also incorrectly specified the source of the art. The exhibit contains art from both the Perlin estate and elsewhere.
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