Life Lessons de Sherry Chayat

Life Lessons: The Art of Jerome Witkin

Sherry Chayat

Kenneth Baker

Sherry Chayat's incisive and compassionate updating of the artist's oeuvre discusses Witkin's masterpieces of the past decade and plots the impact of the painter's personal life on his creative output. For the past decade, Witkin and his wife suffered through the agony of nearly losing their son, Andrew, born in 1994, to a severe blood disorder. This new edition focuses on the artist's last eleven years, a period that not only includes work that Witkin considers his best but also his most personal. Chayat's final chapter on this part of the artist's life is insightful and memorable.

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As a master of realism, Jerome Witkin illustrates in his art the moral plight of everyday lives. His most complex and critically acclaimed works - intense, often disturbing scenes of the Holocaust - have earned him a growing international audience. Through the "virtues of descriptive vividness and accuracy", as Kenneth Baker writes in his Foreword, Sherry Chayat elucidates Witkin's success in almost single-handedly returning to the realm of painting those subjects that are powerfully universal as well as intensely personal. Witkin believes that this is his domain as a painter, as it was for artists like Goya and Eakins. Mortal Sin: In the Confession of J. Robert Oppenheimer; Death as an Usher: Berlin, 1933; Subway: A Marriage; The Screams of Kitty Genovese - Witkin's huge and often multipaneled canvases deal with human dilemmas and current societal issues, such as the homeless, AIDS, and drugs. His art demonstrates that we bear a moral responsibility for the pain suffered by others. "I'm not just a painter", Witkin states. "I'm a person looking at my century. We must get back to someplace where we can feel again, where we have value, a sense of the future".