Jerome Myers

“LED FIELD BY DECADES”

So declared Jerome Myers’s 1940 obituary in all caps. Indeed, the instructors at Cooper Union and the Art Students League in the late 1880s and early 90s didn’t know what to do with their student who seemed to have no special interest in academic discipline, the old masters, or even Paris, as artistically well-regarded as it was at the time. It’s not that he wasn’t impressed by the work he saw in that city; he simply felt he’d seen work just as good in the United States. 

In 1902, back in New York, Myers set to work producing his signature urban scenes, subdued in palette while spontaneous in composition, with a particular emphasis on the character of groups occupying the parks and streets of his city (“to me the impression of group life became a guiding star”). By 1908 Myers had his first one-man show, in the same gallery that would host the first exhibition of The Eight just a couple months later (a group that, despite his artistic parallels and friendship with Robert Henri, he was curiously excluded from). 

Myers was a champion of progressive art early in the century, particularly realism — the first planning meeting for the renowned 1913 Armory Show took place in his apartment. He dedicated an exhausting year of his life to the endeavor, which he saw as an opportunity to showcase radical American artists. The eventual involvement of Arthur B. Davies, however, marked a turn in the show’s emphasis towards European modernism. Myers called the resulting show “the great American betrayal.” 

Myers’s artistic interest remained with the Lower East Side and its people, even as he felt uneasy about its shifts (less warmth in human encounters, and in the quality of light, going as it did from gas to electric). He was a diligent recorder of immigrant life: the markets, the music, the moments of play and rest. Though much of his work remained faithful to his subjects, one detail stands out: children were often found in their Sunday best, sans dirt. Dropped unceremoniously into the foster system at age 10, Myers may have been creating a kind of safety and rosiness that he himself hadn’t known for the kids who ran laughing through his paintings.