Expressing The Chaos: The Abstract Expressionism Of Miriam Beerman | Perspective

[Music] [Music] i've been an artist since i was seven years old i like to draw and i like to observe nature and i like to observe human forms [Music] i just am an artist and i'm getting old and i can't remember things as well as i used to i was you know i was always an artist that's all i want to do anyhow it's very instinctive [Music] [Music] you look at the work and you decide what it is where it's going what it's made of and so forth and so on i mean you have to do a little thinking and a little work yourself you can't expect everybody to feed you all the information at once when i first started my parents set up a desk for me in the kitchen of our house in providence rhode island and i would sit there at that desk and draw and draw a door [Music] i knew from the age of eight and she was doing portraits of people that looked like them it was amazing then when i got a little older my parents would take me out to the country they would sit in the car while i went out and did landscape paintings my mother and her fur coat my father with his cigar and i would go out into the woods and paint and draw i was born sickly and i had to fight sickness and ailments of all kinds and i managed to go right through it with great bravery and i you know persisted so i spent a lot of time thinking and reading books and being by myself and the whole idea of being alone and and having all of these reactions still in my head you know brought about a lot of these works she knew what she wanted out of life she knew she always wanted to go to school of design and she knew she had talent [Music] i was always at it and then when i went to the rhode island school of design i thought i would major in commercial art that's what people urged me to do and i couldn't i couldn't hack it really i didn't like it and so i immediately went into the painting department and was very inspired by the head of the department there and my teacher john fraser who's no longer living but he was uh very inspirational he liked my work he called me a colorist and um a colorist can handle color in a special way so that it you know things happen and he told the class that there were only one or two colorists who walked the earth at the same time i had a fulbright grant to paris and i had a huge studio rent free because this was right after the war and this russian lady who owned the apartment house had to rent it in order to not have it confiscated by the state so she would she let me and my friend who was also a painter lived there casa worked in that building it was in boulevard in paris the family hadn't been over to europe yet and when she went we were very impressed [Music] and we loved seeing the work she did she did beautiful work at one point i did take a trip around to various other countries i went to spain and i saw goya's work and goya really impressed me one called witch's sabbath impressed me very much and i came back and i began working more on the idea of you know the horror of that people meet with in their lives and in their existences [Music] one can only have visceral reactions to miriam's art um so it's degree of viscerality i've been influenced by abstract expressionism in particular german expressionism i've always liked german art miriam's work just there's something about it there's just a real true human quality to miriam's work it's just very honest and raw [Music] a lot of these paintings came from my own experiences in my in my own lifetime and there is a certain quality of grotesqueness to it but it comes really out of my own background in a way you know i got to recognize the grotesque through my own experiences i heard that she was the real deal meaning someone absolutely identified with and through her day-to-day practice someone who was you know really working at it and had been for her entire life this was a calling for her it was amazing to me that here was this artist making very powerful very impressive paintings since the late 30s early 1940s coming out of an intellectual culture committed to the depiction discussion of socio-political themes [Music] the disasters and terrors of of life [Music] one can sort of see through her work what it was like for her as a person and how she reads the outside world how she sees them how she sees the suffering overall and how she is very compassionate inside and she understands and she in her way she's expressing all that pain and i suppose that ultimately i am digging in to the subconscious in a way that harbors all of these thoughts of pain anger survival i wonder if that's why i had all those nightmares her work really smacked you but it's like the grandeur of the the large paintings she's like in stature herself so small that she makes these monumental statements that are to her like no big deal you know they just it just that's what she does and sometimes i'm i'm a little too impulsive but for the most part i think i know what i'm doing because i've been doing this for so many years you have to keep at it not only because you're you're disciplining yourself it's because you can't live without doing it i mean it's a kind of existence that is the only rational existence [Music] being prolific is just for those people is just like breathing they have to do it they don't know anything else miriam lives her art she breathes it she eats it she chats about it she thinks about it she just is her drawings her gesture drawings her paintings her collages there's nothing contrived about anything that she does this is called bloody heads this was painted during the vietnamese war and i painted this as a protest against the war and also i had uh just been in a very serious automobile accident which my head went through the windshield her father was very concerned he kept saying tell me is it her eyes is it her eyes we didn't know what it was but she recovered [Music] my nose was cut off in my automobile accident so if i paint long noses um you know so replenishing my own in a way in the in the imagery i'm not interested in pretty pictures i mean that's obvious now isn't it [Music] we lived on eastern parkway in brooklyn right near grand army plaza it was a nice place to grow up it was park slope in the 60s and my mother always had a studio wherever she was it was like a two-bedroom apartment and one of the bedrooms was her studio and i think i had the other bedroom and i think they slept in the dining room my parents people ask me was it scary seeing all those big scary paintings all the time and i always said no because you just got used to it so i just grew up with those paintings so i didn't i was never disturbed by [Music] them my father was a professor of american history working all the time teaching high school in new york city while writing his dissertation on new york in the red scare in the 1920s he was sort of like the cerebral professor removed the person thinking about the big thoughts of life but we just play ball and go swimming and stuff he was a very hard worker he was a pretty good dad i think honestly i was always closer with my mother and i think every little kid thinks well if i had to choose between mom or dad who would i choose and i think i chose mom she was a very good parent in that she never said don't do this don't do that she was always like go do what you want to do she was supportive in that way [Music] it was a it was a bit horrendous for me to keep you know doing like the bloody heads [Music] i started painting animals [Music] in the 70s i had a a one-person exhibition at the brooklyn museum of animals and that's what i was drawing this was in the brooklyn museum show called the giant tortoise it's nothing like what my paintings have become since then i became interested in animals and my animal growing as a result of having been kept away from animals as a child because i had asthma so i you know i had this whole new experience and wherever i traveled i would visit the zoos and look at the animals there and i began drawing them and now i have a cat i was the first woman to have a one-woman show at the brooklyn museum for a long time galleries weren't interested in women they they mostly had men in the galleries in the art galleries in new york of course everything is harder when you're a woman everything is harder for women of miriam's generation there really was a glass ceiling it was virtually impossible to have your work shown [Music] the art world is part of the world and the world has always been sexist if you just look back to pollock and lee krasner i mean lee krasner didn't get nearly the recognition that pollock did the brooklyn museum was one of the institutions that was very open to women's roles it was also very much part of the advanced thinking of the time that women deserve a place in the art world and recognition for a woman in 1971 to have a solo show is pretty remarkable it was a beautiful show page after page of animals it looked like they would come off the paper and bite you [Music] there are only so many great museums in the new york metropolitan area in the united states and many of them were questioning themselves and trying to shift gears if you will miriam was a part of that there was a new york times review and it was negative there was an ignorance and dismissal of women as serious practitioners of art or whose art deserved to be shown in galleries and museums you finally get a big break and it's in a big museum and it's up on the wall and then this guy comes along you never you know you even got a chance to speak to and he just trashes you uh in the new york times it's upsetting the interesting thing is that years later he did a complete 180 and referenced his prior criticism and said that he was too harsh you know i don't think he ever spoke to my mother either actually there was a time when uh i felt persona known garage [Music] montclair was a beautiful town it was quiet and it was peaceful it was uh leafy and she liked being there it was a good choice for her and my dad was getting his phd and he founded a journal of social sciences and he was working on his second book he had his first book published he was working on a second one and he was working on a commercial book as well [Music] and my mom got written about in time magazine around that time so they were very busy it was the beginning of the semester he just like all up fort and miriam told us how he you just said bye miriam and he goes off but that one morning she was telling us he walked down the steps turn around came back and kissed her goodbye my mother came in to see me at school and told me point blank what had happened that my father had died it just happened suddenly he went up to the schoolyard fell down and died and it was a surprise to all of us i sort of stood there for a moment and took it in and i think then i asked well am i going back to class now which you know for a f for uh um 11 year old was kind of a bizarre question but kind of wasn't you know because it was you know it's presented me in such a matter-of-fact way that uh i wasn't really clear on how to or i was just in shock i guess i was really in shock that's probably what happened and um but you know such as life through julian that way because then she really was all alone with the build we really didn't talk about my father very much and i think that was sort of a compact i would never want to look at old photographs i would never want to sort of talk about the past [Music] neither of us really knew how to you know go on but we managed you know and i think i had a pretty normal childhood despite all that after my husband died he died at age 43. we had just moved to montclair and this painting was the first painting i made um after he died and uh it's a kind of metamorphosis work it was frustrating for my mother because she was happy in brooklyn and we only moved to montclair for my father's career i think we partly stayed in montclair honestly um because no one could figure out what else to do everyone was just trying to get through the day so it wasn't really like a well let's stay in montclair now because montclair is so great but it was more just like well we happen to be here so here we are in here is a an interesting drawing but you can't get a very good shot of it because there's a lot of stuff in front of it excuse me i'm sorry this one yeah yeah it's everything's sort of falling apart with the lighting so you see this she had a whole floor that she could paint in my retrospective and here there was a mess and it looked good the worst thing was the cat would go up there and pee there were a lot of paintings stored in that space so in every little nook and cranny they were painting stuffed into every little alcove when i when i get some money i'm going to have new lighting put in here [Music] it just seemed like the right spot for her this one i just finished her attic space was a painting studio and then the lower floors were collage studios and then the dining room was a place to show work to people you know like a gallery so and her living room was like another gallery and the porch was turned into a storage area for her painting so it was a huge house but it all served the work this is in progress a studio was everything to miriam she said all i want to do is paint so when she couldn't sleep or when she has an idea she always goes up to the third floor and she would paint you wee hour it was basically a live-in sanctuary storehouse there were some rooms that were just so over overladened with material i i thought of it as a combination of alibaba's cave and tutankhamun's you know tomb where you sort of execute you realize there's a whole universe here that has yet to be explored [Music] [Music] [Music] i made some white paint for myself and then um i painted everything in here with my hands so i didn't use a brush at all i just used my hands and it's not finished but it's the beginning it's hard to to compare her to anyone else and i think that that's what i really liked about her work is that you could see those influences historically from some of the masters because it is very technical but i really thought that miriam kind of created a style of her own [Music] i had known about miriam's work from looking at books that go back into the 60s and 70s so i was aware of her work in particular in the 1970s there was a movement which was called the new humanism which dealt with the human figure problems violence war things like that but it was very much outside of the mainstream work like miriam's is really difficult for the art world to digest to miriam's work i think that historical context working outside the mainstream having to your work perhaps misinterpreted is part of what makes it interesting different people have different careers partly because of their own personalities and motivation and partly because of you know the way life hits you miriam is under recognized for her quality of work and her general body of work and the caliber that it's at but on the other hand there is an incredible list of very prestigious institutions that own miriam's work [Music] it comes down to the age-old plight of the artist that you can either work on your work genuinely and wholeheartedly and just devote your life to it or you can market yourself the whole time [Music] it's a real political game [Music] and miriam doesn't strike me as the type of person who would be very interested in doing that given that the work would find limited interest within the new york art world it's amazing that she has continued to do it and with such vigor for so many years my work is a little wild too wild for some people [Music] there's no message in any of my work that i intend however many people see messages in my work all the time so everybody interprets it but um you know it means many things but i don't have any specific meaning and i don't explain the meaning of my work i mean the work speaks for itself you can then interpret it in any way you want my mother always thought that you know she had a very healthy good regard for her own place in the art world and she you know we would go to museums and she'd say oh i can do better than that you know i'm better than this guy i'm there and these were like big people that she was talking about i see an influence of chagall in the elements of fantasy in the subject matter which comes out of biblical particularly jewish old testament sources [Music] she had done a series of paintings based on the biblical plagues and there was a big really powerful image of cattle disease so there was this sort of crazy cow dying in the middle of this huge expressionistic landscape it was a strong kind of cartoonish image i began to see the relationship the strange interesting relationship between the comic and the serious and bombastic on the other side she likes to play visually and it's very evident with the work it has this guttural intensity to it that comes through along with the playfulness you can't quite tell whether it's tears or laughter and this is the thing that is so pointed in her work miriam is a is a sort of an old soul and you see this in her you know in her and through her these biblical references deluge is a signature example of of her accomplishment it's about terror it's about disaster it's about retribution there's a struggle there there are creatures existing in this terrifying situation but this struggle is really apparent in the way the painting is made there's this flood of paint it's almost as if miriam is doing battle in the process of making the picture [Music] this is all i think very autobiographical just sort of been fighting for my life ever since i was born and so these works are a reflection of that that's what expressionism is about it's not just a picture it is an event the holocaust and all that happened in nazi germany in the 40s i had a great effect upon my work and then i began to think more and more about the holocaust i don't think in our pluralistic art today we understand how strong the ban was on imagery in the late 50s and much of the 60s the proper mode of addressing the holocaust in the visual arts had been predominantly through abstraction one wasn't supposed to represent the unsayable the unmentionable the horror and terror of those years in the 1980s as the holocaust became a major subject matter for artists who were all of a sudden no longer embarrassed to go back to the reality of what happened to go back to this expressive expressionist human figurative imagery [Music] miriam's art was fitting in with something that was just beginning to be seen [Music] [Music] i think the work that the jewish museum purchased a number of years ago is a wonderful example of that line of thinking in the art world i like the idea that it compartmentalized these six heads as if they were in cages very existential very isolated from each other from the world these individuals who were symbolic of suffering were also frightfully alone the horrifying message telling us about the holocaust or things like it but doing it in a way that draws us in and makes it impossible for us to ignore the statement that we have to look [Music] she's able to translate that onto a canvas for anyone to come up and see and whether they experience the holocaust read about the holocaust are jewish are not jewish are religious not religious are anti-war pro-war they can see something in her work that moves them she never did pop and she didn't do colorful things that you just put on the wall people want to turn away rather than look at because it's it's you know makes them makes them feel uncomfortable [Music] ugly nasty [Music] tough paintings i didn't like it if you want to know the truth [Music] she never was in a place where she was being tortured and i didn't want her to be there this is bobby yar and uh this was as you probably all know what bobby er was it wasn't an historical moment in russia where jews were lined up in front of an open grave and shot into the grave so i am in a way i'm constantly protesting history it's nightmarish work it deals with the unconscious and there's a sense of victimization in the work the sense of dealing with torment this is demonic and wrathful aspect that refers to conditions living conditions and social conditions and at the same time there's a tremendous amount of empathy that flows through the work as well as dark as the subjects are in her paintings i don't get the sense that she has a particularly dark outlook [Music] you know painting is a safe place that you can exercise those demons [Music] the collages are a little more troubling because they represent a bit of a chaotic consciousness that that may be a little more prevalent in my mother's life and thought and her thinking processes in the last few years than occurred earlier i don't think i just know that i'm going to do a collage and i know that i'm working with certain papers and i begin to cut them up or place them down on the paper and arrange them and as i arrange them i begin to get the idea of how they're going to work when i go to do a collage i i look through my drawings and i look through some photographs which i may have on hand and then i i begin to think of you know putting them up on the wall and as i put them up i think of what i want to juxtapose and so i will take a drawing or another photograph and put it next to it but usually i like to relate the drawings and the photographs together they are what they are if you look at them you will decide what the relationships are and the relationships will be different to everyone and if i say something it would sort of bring it down to a different level and you know to a lower level if anything i don't know why this is all curling up like this i didn't mean it to be like this but apparently the moisture in the air has has caused this wavy thing which is not bad i mean i don't mind it i didn't intend it that way but i think it's i don't know well i think there's a lot of chaos in my work and i'm not trying to put order for the chaos i'm expressing the chaos it's inside of everyone but it's certainly inside of me everyone has it most people don't admit i'm very slow because i've got a sore foot there were some things printed on the page to begin with so i was working around the printed area which is fun i really like to do that and the print and everything drawing over the printed page i don't know i just draw you know it's like doodling she's had a lot of shows in the last few years it's important for artists to keep showing every artist wants to be known and you know so recognized and appreciated [Music] glad to see a face that i really know bill is a very important part of my process of getting to know the work when i was at the corcoran gallery of art so that his mother might be appreciated for what she has accomplished and i i think that's very admirable and uh very beautiful i had been in this this type of show once before yeah yeah usually it's the artist who's pushing themselves to have a son or a daughter pushing for their parents while the parents are still alive is unusual although i knew about miriam's work the fact that bill had contacted me put it in my head and so when i was looking for work for this exhibition i was curating she was an obvious choice she was in the permanent collection of the whitney museum you know when i was a little kid i wasn't involved and i wasn't involved in getting her in the brooklyn museum or the metropolitan museum or any of the other major museums i just in the last few years helped a little bit get her work into a couple museums here and there but the vast majority of her life she did it all on her own i don't want people to think that the world found out about her through me because they didn't they found out about her through her and then in the last few years when she's you know more aging and infirm i helped you know send a few emails to a few museums here and there i have to go and sit down somewhere okay where am i living now with me in washington you're living with bill so i have bill's phone number i have your phone number yeah what's the name of the place where i island avenue washington dc but i'm not there now yeah you are okay my mother said this at one point she said to me i you know set the point where i have the most knowledge and and the most wisdom and i can't remember what's going on see that squirrel amazing how he can do what he does that's my son that's your son it looks like your grandson ezekiel yeah they do people say that ezekiel's eyes are like mine my mother has dementia and so i can you know as they say i can relate to how awful that situation must be certainly for her son for people who are close to her on some other level too people who have dementia are living in the present in the moment so in some level there's they are in a state of grace we needed a place for my mom to live right near us and that worked for a while but eventually she couldn't live alone anymore so um she came and lived here with us but my mom occasionally has hallucinations and she'll fall and so um it became untenable for her to live here just for her own safety and now she's living in a group home in potomac when you have these memory issues you don't understand that you can't really just move back home and take care of yourself good very good so take good care so good to talk to you miriam you sound very well you know i miss her she's far away but i really feel peaceful much better because she was really really struggling i like it here very much what do you like about it i like the size of it for one thing i like the largeness of this room a sense of being able to really feel in a larger space she doesn't have a lot of stimulating people to talk to i mean she is in better shape than a number of the residents there i always thought if i could just find a group home that had like maybe picasso and moreau and mikhail barishnikov and a few other artists you know that would be okay she'd enjoy that for a while he wants to know if he'll draw a face so he can color it draw a fish a face a face a face this is the one you did the last time you were here you did it you did some of it and hannah did some of it oh no wonder i like it that's good i think he's going to be an artist when he grows up too grandma oh i love it wow i think sophia's your students are faced [Music] she's my mentor from montclair state she was my professor she was my inspiration i've been searching for this photo album i don't know if you can how good your eyes are but this is our studio classes at montclair oh really let me look at it that's pretty good did you do this you taught me how to do this we were drawing together at montclair it had to be 30 35 years ago and i would draw these huge drawings you lay them out on the floor and tony ann and i used to draw on the floor do you remember that yeah it was the most amazing class because she was into figurative drawing and she was amazing drawer and when we went to her studio at monk you know at her house at montclair and saw what she was doing we're like oh this is a real artist i do remember when we used to draw miriam sometimes we'd catch her just involved in watching us and watching us draw and you could tell she wanted to get out there with her charcoal really whether her memory is extant you know whether it's there or not she's still there everyone wants to feel like their life was worth it and and was important and this is what you know is important to her and um she wants other people to to see it [Music] the protest against war and injustice and cruelty is timeless goyo said it and miriam biermann said it and 200 years from now someone else will need to say it and these are all you know these are not things that will hang in a gallery or anything they're just drawings which i scribble off and get off my mind and then eventually i will you know either keep them or do something better to them or whatever but you know i just keep doing it you

Channel: Perspective

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Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, miriam beerman artist, miriam beerman documentary, art history, art documentary, artist profile, expressing the chaos, abstract art, abstract expressionism, contemporary art, abstract painting, abstract expressionism (art period/movement), abstract art (art period/movement), abstract expressionism painting, abstract expressionism painting tutorial, abstract expressionism art history

Id: SdYy6LoGXfc

Length: 49min 20sec (2960 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020