Burton Silverman

American painter (born 1928)

Burton Silverman is an American artist.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, Silverman received a BA from Columbia College and studied at the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute. Now entering his sixth decade as an artist, Silverman has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League, the National Academy School of Fine Arts, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and Brigham Young University's College of Fine Arts. Silverman was also the Smith Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Washington University in Washington, D. C.

Silverman's work has been included in retrospectives at the Butler Institute of American Art, the Brigham Young Museum of Art, the Sherwin Miller Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts University, and the Hofstra University Museum. His art has been featured at in group exhibits at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Arnot Art Museum. Public collections which host Silverman paintings includes, but is not limited to: the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, The Georgia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum, the Mint Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Columbus Museum, the Arkansas Art Center, the Seven Bridges Foundation in Connecticut, and the Smith Museum of Auburn University also host Silverman paintings. Recently, Silverman has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Henoch in New York City and at the Haynes Galleries in Nashville, Tennassee. Commissioned portraits painted by Silverman have included notable jurists, medical doctors, and educators, from clients such as the University of Chicago, Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Weill Cornell Medical Center.

In 1956, Silverman traveled with fellow artist Harvey Dinnerstein to Montgomery, Alabama, to document the profound social changes taking place after Black activists refused to ride the city's then segregated buses. During their visit, Dinnerstein and Silverman created more than 90 drawings ranging from courtroom scenes to church meetings to portraits of those who chose, according to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to "walk with dignity rather than ride in humiliation". The drawings they created there were a dramatic reconstruction of this turning point in American culture. The drawings appeared in various solo exhibitions of Silverman's and Dinnerstein's artwork, but as a whole, the entire collection was first shown in 2005 at the Delaware Art Museum and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art in 2006 an exhibition tilted: "In Glorious Dignity: Drawings of the Montgomery Bus Boycott". As described in the exhibition catalogue, "They traveled to document through their drawings ordinary people engaged in a mighty endeavor, a demonstration of civil disobedience which came to be known as the Montgomery bus boycott. Soon what began as a local phenomenon received widespread national and international attention, serving as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement." According to Silverman and Dinnerstein, the boycott was "a struggle that went beyond specific issues of segregation in the buses to larger concerns of inequality across the nation".

Silverman is considered one of America's most accomplished and important realist painters and illustrators. His draftsmanship, brushwork, composition, use of color, and tonality both owe a debt to and have continued the traditions and standards established by the great representationalist artists throughout history. Realism has made something of a resurgence at the beginning of the 21st century and many in the latest generation cite Silverman's work as inspiration, much as Silverman himself drew upon and advanced upon the works of Rembrandt, Degas, Sargeant, and more. "I have tried to reunite form—both color and composition—with content. the realistic and narrative imagery, to arrive at some kind of synthesis of 20th century formalism with 20th century sensibilities", Silverman has said. "I do not believe that the way paint is applied to a canvas should be more important than what is portrayed." After being discharged from the U. S. Armed Forces, he worked as both gallery artist and illustrator. For the latter, he was election to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2001. In addition to illustrations featured in Time magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire, famously, Silverman's watercolor painting featured on Jethro Tull's 1971 album, Aqualung, an iconic image that is still celebrated today. Beginning the early 1990s, Silverman focused on portraiture and refining his style, which ran in opposition to the dictums and tenets of modernist art—in and of itself a radical act. "In view of the many honors he has been accorded, it may seem odd to describe Burton Silverman as an artistic underdog, yet the designation actually fits. Unlike his exact contemporary, the abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, Silverman is neither world famous nor rich. This situation says less about the immense talents of these two men than it does about the state of American art in the 20th century", the art historian Mathias Anderson wrote. According to Dartmouth College Robert C. McGrath, "His art may be seen as a kind of radical realism by virtue of its continuing devotion to a humanist vision that has survived modernist dogma of the 50s as well as the austere impersonal canons of judgment embedded in the 'new realism' of the eighties. For Silverman, form remains inextricably linked to meaning. Asserting itself throughout his painting is the fluid brushwork and natural coloration that informs the eye while eliciting, alchemically, a compassionate understanding of the human condition. In the final analysis, it is Silverman's unflinching vision together with his creative rethinking of tradition that constitutes his most defiant and enduring artistic contribution."

He is the recipient of nine awards from the National Academy of Design Museum including two Henry W. Ranger Purchase Awards. He was awarded a Gold medal from the Portrait Society of America 2004, the Annual Distinguished Artist Award from the Newington Cropsey Cultural Foundation, The John Singer Sargent Gold Medal from American Society of Portrait Artist, 2002, Lifetime Achievement Award The FACE Conference, 2018 and an Honorary Doctorate from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, 2001.